


Hans Røde Dronning

by BethNottingham



Series: Red Queen [3]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, An "if Caroline was the main character" AU, Background delena, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Family History, I borrow characters from there because creating OCs is a lot of work, It is not necessary to watch The Originals to understand this story, Julie Plec can fight me, Klaroline, Non-Explicit Sex, So I just steal from TO to fill a lot of OC roles, Witchcraft, and then people usually don't like them anyway, background katlijah, is that even the ship name?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:26:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22101013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BethNottingham/pseuds/BethNottingham
Summary: Red Queen, Season III. Caroline, newly and finally in a stable, healthy relationship with Klaus, heads off to college as the unofficial last-hurrah of her human life. Dangers lurk around every corner, but hey, they're big, scary vampires; just how bad could it be? It doesn't take long before she discovers that the universe *really* loves to answer that question.Klaroline. Cross-posted to fanfic only up to chapter 6.
Relationships: Caroline Forbes/Klaus Mikaelson, Elena Gilbert/Damon Salvatore, Elijah Mikaelson/Katherine Pierce, Matt Donovan/Rebekah Mikaelson
Series: Red Queen [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1584871
Comments: 23
Kudos: 136





	1. A Rude Awakening

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone, and welcome to Season III of Red Queen! The number of expected chapters may change as I work on this piece, but currently it's outlined around 25 chapters in length. If you have not read the first two seasons, this story probably won't make a lot of sense, as it's diverged pretty heavily from canon by this point.

_Kol didn't feel the dagger as it slipped out of his heart; he hadn't been under its curse long enough to become aware of his surroundings or understand the passage of time outside of himself. The first thing he felt as he returned to consciousness was the wetness of blood on his lips, and the massive crick in his back from the length of time he'd lain still and stiff in the padded but still uncomfortable coffin in which his brother often stored him._

_Licking his lips, he was rewarded with more blood dripping slowly into his mouth, and he sat up instantly, snatching the bag from the hand that held it and slugging the whole thing in four massive gulps. Once every last drop was squeezed from the plastic, he tossed it in no particular direction, then turned to take in the familiar sight of his bastard brother standing beside his resting place, arms folded, waiting for him to get his wits back. This time, Niklaus's brow was furrowed further than usual, and the set of his jaw reminded the younger Original of the nights when Mikael would be so close that they could nearly smell him, and Klaus's whole focus was trained on outwitting their nemesis._

" _Let me guess," Kol drawled slowly, "you bloody idiots woke Silas and are now hopelessly out of your depth."_

" _Close," Klaus gritted out, "but you're off by a year or so, little brother. We made that mistake, paid for it dearly, and dealt with it severely—and permanently. I'm afraid the situation_ since _then has become significantly more complicated."_

" _Huh," Kol muttered. "Well, I suppose next time you might listen to me before doing something so utterly and obviously moronic."_

" _I just might," Klaus laughed humorlessly. Kol sobered. It was fundamentally unlike his proud brother to admit when he was mistaken, or suggest that he might actually take advice from someone, especially someone younger than himself._

_Something was very, very wrong._

" _What's been happening since that little blonde strumpet daggered me, then?" he asked lightly, testing the waters. It was clear Klaus needed something, and badly._

" _That_ little blonde strumpet _saved your miserable life," Klaus hissed slowly. "Nearly at the cost of her own. The siblings Gilbert were armed with the White Oak Stake and had designs on killing you and your entire line to complete the Hunters' Mark in one fell swoop. They would have succeeded too, had Caroline not interfered."_

_Kol swung his legs over, and hopped out of the casket to stand on the concrete floor of Klaus's basement._

" _I suppose I shall have to thank her, then," he shrugged, still wanting to get to the point and find out what lovely trouble everyone had gotten themselves into, so that he could decide whose side to be on._

" _Oh, you're about to," Klaus responded, tossing him another blood bag and nodding towards a change of clothes. "Clean up and meet us in the living room, little brother."_

-0-

_Twenty minutes later, fed, changed, stretched and mostly acceptable-looking, Kol sauntered into Klaus's front room, a swing in his step and a grin on his face. It was so rare that he had the upper hand in anything regarding his siblings, and the fact that Klaus was so upset and so clearly about to ask him for his help made him feel giddy with power._

" _Morning, my lovelies," he greeted everyone, before stopping to take in just who "everyone" was._

_There were two doppelgangers in the room; Elena was standing at the window, peering through the curtains, while Katherine stood, all heels and curls and leather, looking down at someone else on the couch. Elijah sat on the loveseat opposite, the empty space beside him holding a purse that could only be Katherine's. Rebekah sat on the couch that Katherine observed, and the blonde head beside her was Caroline's; she seemed to be the object of the room's collective focus. Klaus sat on Caroline's other side, and Matt leaned against the wall, arms folded, looking uncharacteristically serious._

_Then Kol's senses honed in on Caroline, and he rounded the couch to get a better look at her._

_His eyes widened, his eyebrows soaring as he took a step closer, her scent confirming what his ears and eyes had already plainly told him._

_Slowly, he shifted his gaze to his brother, whose face held the signature combination of concern and conniving that meant one of the few people he loved was in great danger, and he was about to kill it with fire, or whatever else it took to make it go away._

" _What. The bleeding hell. Did I miss?" Kol demanded slowly._

_Katherine snorted from beside him._

" _Would you like the events in order of magnitude, or chronologically?" Elijah asked from behind him._

" _Start from the beginning," Kol responded, all trace of laughter gone. This wasn't a question of picking sides anymore. This was an impossible thing, and as a witch trapped in a vampire's body for over a thousand years, he never could resist an impossible thing…_


	2. Last Kiss of Summer

Klaus awoke to the soothing feeling of Caroline's long fingers running slowly through his hair. He shifted, wrapping an arm around her and getting more comfortable.

"What's the very last moment you can leave?" he murmured. He felt her little exhale of laughter.

"Not late enough," she whispered back, kissing his forehead. "I have no intention of being late for check-in; standing in long lines makes me hungry, and the people in front of me start to look like smoothies."

"And security cameras are a consideration on college campuses, I suppose," Klaus murmured in mock disappointment. Caroline's alarm began to chime, and she rolled over to silence it.

"How long have you been awake?" Klaus asked, glancing over his shoulder at his clock. It was a quarter to six.

"I don't know; a long time. I'm not sure I was ever asleep," she confessed.

"You could've woken me," he grumbled, dragging himself up so he was lounging on his side.

"You seemed pretty exhausted after last night," Caroline responded with a smirk, leaning up to kiss him properly. "And I kept thinking I'd fall asleep if I laid still long enough," she admitted.

"Still could've woken me," Klaus repeated moodily. Caroline sat all the way up, then looked down at him.

"It's not like we're never going to see each other again," she reminded him. "Whitmore's only an hour away."

"Forty-five point three miles," he corrected her. "39.36 nautical miles, 72.9 kilometers…"

"2,870,208 inches," Caroline added for him with a bubbling laugh, "and you," she continued, tapping the tip of her index finger against his nose, "own seven cars, three motorcycles and one totally unnecessary semi-truck. I think we'll manage."

"Doesn't mean I have to like it," he muttered, but rolled his eyes in reluctant agreement as he sat up as well. "I'm guessing you're still vetoing me helping you move in?" he added, standing up and pulling on some pants. Caroline shook her head as she picked up a basket of clothing that she'd set out the night before.

"If you come, then Elena gets to bring Damon, and I really can't see the two of you carrying stuff up and down four flights of stairs together without killing each other. And yeah, college campuses have security cameras, so that would be pretty difficult to explain to the campus cops."

"Fun, though," Klaus responded with a smirk. Caroline tossed a pillow at him on her way to the bathroom, which he caught dexterously.

"I gotta take a nice long shower before I'm subjected to whatever amenities they have on campus," she announced. Then she turned around in the bathroom doorway and looked at her hybrid boyfriend expectantly. "Seeing as I did wake up before my first alarm," she continued, "I do have _plenty_ of time to kill…"

"Well, I can think of quite a few enjoyable ways to take care of that, sweetheart…" Klaus murmured, following her into the shower.

-0-

"Caroline!" Elena exclaimed, waving at her from across the south parking lot. "What took you so long?" she asked as Caroline ducked back into her car to grab her purse and a pile of things she'd packed in a laundry basket. "I've been here for half an hour. I thought you'd get here before me."

"Sorry," Caroline sighed. "The main lot was really full and then the line at check-in was longer than I expected."

"Not because you and a certain Original Hybrid got carried away this morning?" Elena checked, raising an eyebrow and hoisting her own basket onto her hip. Caroline's cheeks burned, and she glared at Elena, who smirked.

"What can I say?" she shrugged, squaring her shoulders and tossing her hair. "Hybrid stamina is either a blessing from above or temptation from below." Elena mimed puking, and Caroline giggled, grinning. "Okay," she added, getting back to business, "don't forget, we have to pretend to struggle with the heavy stuff—we'll team-lift the mini fridges, but we can pack them with smaller items to speed things up since we won't really notice the extra weight."

"Or we could just flirt up some help," Elena suggested.

"An option, sure," Caroline agreed, "but if we have people hanging around, then we'll have to go normal speed for the organizing until we can shake them off, remember."

"Ah, fair point," Elena responded, nodding and frowning. "Girl power it is."

As they made their way across the lawn towards Wilson hall, Caroline's eyes took in every detail of the scene. The size of the building, the height of the windows, the number of fire escapes, the outdoor security cameras, the people milling around, carrying bags and boxes… She could pick out the freshmen by their school-issued lanyards (she'd stowed hers in her pocket immediately) but was struck by watching the families. Everyone had at least one parent and several other relatives lending a hand to get them moved in. She didn't often think about the fact that between them, she and Elena had lost six parents, but it was true, and today, it showed.

'But,' she reminded herself firmly, 'my parents loved me, my mom was there for me and changed her whole worldview when I became a vampire, and my dad didn't go crazy until near the end, and that's more than some people had. More than Klaus, more than Bonnie, more than Stefan and Damon…' She squared her shoulders and playfully raced Elena to the main entrance.

-0-

Carol Lockwood wasn't one for casual town carnivals, preferring to avoid the cheap beer and sugar-coated children in favor of the more cultured galas which typically took place afterwards. However, she was still the mayor, and had to be careful not to show open disdain for any town-sanctioned events. So, in spite of the sticky, clinging late August heat, there she sat, on the cleanest bit of picnic table bench she could find, surveying the gathering with a mask of serenity carefully settled over her face.

"Beer for your thoughts, Mayor Lockwood?" Stefan greeted her, approaching her with two red cups.

"Stefan," she started reproachfully, "I know you're technically over drinking age, but most of the other watchful eyes don't."

"True," Not-Stefan shrugged, setting the two cups down—one full of beer, one completely empty, "but the watchful eyes aren't noticing much of anything today, trust me." He picked up Carol's wrist, turned it over, and slit it with a pocket knife.

"What are you doing?" Carol demanded, somehow unable to cry out, stand up or resist in any way.

"Outing myself as Not-Stefan," Not-Stefan shrugged as Carol's blood drained slowly into the empty red cup.

"Silas," Carol breathed. "How?"

"Well, it's pretty simple," Silas responded conversationally. "The spell that froze me was bound by a witch, and when that witch died, I was set free. I've been spending the summer honing my awesome mental powers, and now I'm getting ready to use them for their intended purpose."

"And what purpose would that be?" Carol demanded a little shakily as the immortal released her hand, cleaning off the excess blood with a napkin.

"Well, I could tell you, but wouldn't it be more fun if it was a surprise?" he replied with a humorless smile. "Anyway," he added after a sip of Carol's blood, "everybody important have skipped town—and who can blame them, really?—and I can see that you aren't in the loop; you have no idea of the whereabouts of the person I'm looking for." He paused again, gulping down the rest of the blood, and stacking the empty cup under the full one, effectively hiding the evidence to all but the most thorough dumpster-divers. "So, all you need to remember," he finished, "is that Stefan stopped by to say 'hi.'"

The last few minutes drained from Carol Lockwood's mind like sand through the stem of an hourglass. She smiled, taking a sip of the cheap beer to be polite, ignoring the tangy, metallic taste on the rim of the cup—which she chalked up to something on the keg.

"Call your friends, Stefan?" she requested maternally. "Everyone's been worried about you walking off the face of the earth."

"Will do, mayor," Not-Stefan responded, standing up, stuffing his knife back into his jeans pocket, and striding off into the crowd.

Carol sighed, took one more sip of the disgusting beer, then surreptitiously tossed the rest into the grass. That was when she noticed the ugly slash along her wrist.

'This is why I hate outdoor carnivals!' she thought vehemently as she clamped a hand over it, making mental notes to get a tetanus shot and have all the park picnic tables checked for exposed screws and jagged metal bits.

-0-

When ACDC's _If You Want Blood_ blared out of Klaus's phone speakers, he was initially so shocked that he just stared at the device like it was someone else's. Caroline's face flashed on his screen, and he set his paintbrush down with narrowed eyes before picking the phone up with his fingertips and hitting the green button, as much to cancel out the ridiculous noise as anything else.

"Ha, ha, darling," he growled into the microphone. Caroline giggled on the other end.

"I thought it was a good fit," she responded faux-innocently. Klaus rolled his eyes heavenward, shaking his head and reminding himself to put a fingerprint lock on his phone, and set her alarms to play something particularly annoying the next time she was home and he had access to her phone.

"So, miss me already, Love?" he checked, "or are you calling because you forgot something?"

"Oh, I'm missing home all right," she laughed; "missing Alphonse's cooking, after the lunch I just had."

"Meal plan that bad, or Alphonse that good?" he asked, putting his phone on speaker and setting it down so he could go back to his painting.

"Bit of both," she responded. "I miss you," she admitted quietly.

"You've been gone six hours, Caroline!" he heard Elena shouting in the background, and the hybrid snorted.

"And I suppose she's refrained from calling Damon, has she?" he asked.

"An hour ago," Caroline responded in a loud voice, clearly also for Elena's benefit. "To tell him about a little snag with the housing office," she added in a lower voice, sounding like she was clenching her teeth.

"A snag compulsion can't fix?" Klaus frowned. It wasn't like his girlfriend to let things slide, especially considering the trouble she'd gone through to ensure that everything went smoothly with their living situation.

"Not with the Elena Gilbert judge-y eyes burning into the back of my neck," she muttered.

"My sympathies," Klaus snorted. "She can't watch your every move forever, you know."

"Once Bonnie gets here, it'll all get settled through the proper channels," Caroline sighed.

"Thought she was supposed to be there," Klaus commented. "Wasn't that the point of you buying all of her bedding and organizers and dropping them at her dad's place?"

"I guess they got distracted," Caroline huffed. "Her mom keeps adding places to their trip—having separation issues, in my opinion."

"Says the girl calling home after only six hours…" Klaus muttered with a dimpled smirk.

"That's clinginess, not separation issues," Caroline responded immediately. "Totally different animals."

"I think it's kind of the same…" an unfamiliar voice interrupted from the background.

"That would be Megan," Caroline explained before Klaus could ask. "Our unexpected roommate." He heard the shuffling sounds of her getting up and leaving the room.

"Sounds like you're getting along _smashingly_ ," the Original murmured, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Hey," Caroline sighed, "better she think that I'm an intolerable bitch now and be happy to move out when Bonnie comes, than think she's my friend, get too close, and start noticing vampy little details. That wouldn't end well for anybody."

"I can imagine," he agreed.

"Of course for now, that means we have to organize our room at human speed, which means no opportunity to explore the campus while everyone else is unpacking," she grumbled. "I'd better get back in there and help Elena."

"I'm gladder than ever that you refused to let me show up today," Klaus quipped. "That sounds like an unutterably tedious plan for the afternoon…"

"Shut up!" Caroline laughed.

"I love you, Caroline," Klaus murmured.

"I love you too," Caroline echoed. "I can't wait for my first excuse to come home."

"I could create one," Klaus suggested with a shrug that he knew she couldn't see.

"Don't murder people just to get me to a funeral," she warned. He snapped his fingers in audible mock-disappointment.

"Well, let it be noted that I suggested something," he responded. Caroline laughed and disconnected the call.

He'd wait until the _next_ time she said she missed him before admitting he'd bought himself a modest house just off of campus. He wasn't intending on _moving_ there—that would rather defeat the purpose of Caroline's whole "last chance to do things the human way" mentality; he simply intended it as a place where they could have some privacy whenever he visited. He'd give her a chance to wish he'd done something like that before admitting he had. The little things he did to impress this woman…

-0-

Whitmore had schedule the morning for check-in and unpacking, and to Caroline's mounting irritation, they had to spend all of it doing just that. No vampire speed in front of the aggravatingly friendly human. While she focused on making up for her speed with practiced efficiency, she listened in on Cheap-Knockoff-Bonnie and Elena's polite chit-chat, and learned that Cheap-Knockoff-Bonnie was an avid softball player—her athletic scholarship having landed her the third spot in this dorm room—majoring in exercise science with the intention of becoming a physical therapist, and had chosen Whitmore because a friend of hers had gotten a full ride there, and she wanted to make sure that she attended a school where she knew at least one person. As the rest of her friends were all going into Electronic Engineering or Cosmetology, consequently attending trade schools, that hadn't left her many choices, but she was content with Whitmore, which apparently had above-average health and wellness programs.

Caroline had to bite back the remark that Elena could have told her that, because her dad was a real doctor, and he went here. Knowing that she would say something she'd regret sooner or later, she'd fabricated a form she needed to sign, and with a strong admonition that the practical stranger with whom she was now expected to share personal space _not touch her stuff_ , she headed off in the direction of one of the buildings that housed professors' offices. She figured she'd just take a walk over there, wander around to cool her head, and try to get Bonnie on the phone for the millionth time that day.

What she did not figure on happening, as she rounded the corner of the building, was nearly bumping right into none other than Terry, the older witch Klaus had hired to help out while Caroline was in a coma. It seemed like lifetimes ago, but in reality it had only been a few months. Terry wobbled a little at having to stop so abruptly, and Caroline's hands shot out to steady her, her left still a shade paler than her right.

"Terry?" she checked, frowning in confusion. "Hi," she added, not wanting to seem rude. She did like the witch, after all; it wasn't like seeing her was an unpleasant surprise. It was just that she'd expected college to be a mostly supernatural-free zone, so meeting a witch on move-in day was hardly something she'd planned for.

"Hello, Caroline," Terry greeted her with a smile once she'd regained her balance. "How's dorm decorating going?"

"Um, fine, I guess," Caroline responded, still caught off guard. "I didn't know you knew anyone here."

"Oh, they just hired me, but I'm making friends pretty quick for an old lady," Terry responded conspiratorially. "Klaus helped get me the Occult Studies job," she added at Caroline's continuing confusion. "Part of my fee when I first started working for him was that I wanted a comfy, non-dangerous job with a fat pension once my contract with him was up."

"Oh," Caroline responded, "that makes sense. For a minute there, I thought he sent you as a babysitter and I was going to drive back to Mystic Falls and throttle him." Terry snickered, familiar with the flashed of temper from Caroline and playful sarcasm from Klaus that often characterized their relationship.

"Well, fear not, darling," the witch assured her. "I'm not _reporting_ to him. Although I suppose I _am_ here for emergencies."

"Which, hopefully, we won't have," Caroline sighed, running a hand through her hair. First an unexpected roommate, then a weirdly silent Bonnie, then an unexpected witch; could _anything_ today go as planned? "I'm glad you're comfortable here," she added quickly, realizing how her face must look. "Seriously, it's good to know you have a safer job—it's great! There have just been a lot of surprises today, and I guess I'm not dealing very well." Terry put a wrinkled but still steady hand on her shoulder and nodded understandingly.

"I suppose you won't want to hear about the werewolf cult disguising themselves as a football team, then," she whispered, mock-seriously. Caroling giggled.

"Don't even joke!" she exclaimed. "I'm already halfway convinced that doing things the human way is going to completely suck."

"I suppose it will," Terry agreed, completely seriously. "But I suppose if this is what you want to look back on a thousand years from now, then you should make the most of it, cheap beer, early classes and all." Caroline smiled, and hugged the older woman.

"Thanks, Terry," she murmured. She had to keep reminding herself of that, she thought as she slowly made her way back towards the dorm to pick up her roommates for the opening ceremony that afternoon. She didn't come here to take a vacation. She came here to have a rich, complex learning experience that she could carry with her into the rest of her immortal life. There were bound to be a few bumps along the road, but if humans could handle it, then a powerful immortal vampire could certainly do the same.

-0-

Klaus discovered that Rebekah's ringtone was now Blondie's _Call Me_ in much the same way he'd been subjected to ACDC only an hour before; one moment he was minding his own business, the next minute, the eighties were blaring at him from his phone's speaker. He was going to have to go through every single one of his ringtones, he decided with a sigh, and also come up with a suitable one-up for the blonde culprit.

"Hello, little sister," he greeted her. "I would have thought you'd be too busy enjoying your quarterback's youth and stamina to remember your family back home, but lo and behold, you've found time to give your old brother a call. How familial."

" _Nik_ ," she sobbed after a moment of silence. The smirk dropped from Klaus's face instantly, and he sat up straight.

"What's wrong, Bekah," he demanded quietly.

" _Something terrible's happened_ ," she choked out. " _Nik, I need your help_."

-0-

"The last time I was at a college party, I got drunk on blood and dirty danced with Damon," Elena recalled fondly as they approached the loud, lit-up house which hosted the party to which an attractive junior named Jesse had invited them.

"Ick," Caroline snorted. "The last time I was at a college party, I had a threesome," she added as an afterthought.

"Double ick?!" Elena exclaimed. "Seriously? When was this and how did I not know about it?"

"Um, after Damon and I broke up/he tried to kill me and Stefan locked him in the Salvatore family dungeon, and before Matt and I started dating," Caroline responded with a smirk. "Tiki, Jessica and I all went to visit Carlow University, in Pittsburgh. I mainly just went to get out of Mystic Falls and away from all the drama. It was a good visit. The college wasn't my style though," she added with a grin. Elena shook her head, rolling her eyes.

"You don't do anything halfway, Care," she laughed. "Including rebounding."

"Never have, never will," Caroline grinned, then threaded her arm through Elena's and drew her towards the house. "But for this one, let's make a pact—no blood, no sex, just lots of free booze and loud music."

"I'll drink to that," Elena agreed, "as soon as I get my hands on a drink."

As they approached the house, arm-in-arm, Caroline was reminded powerfully of how close they'd always been, of the way she'd felt and how she'd oriented her social life in middle and high school. This moment, the joking, the giggly excitement, and the little squeak Elena always made when she laughed, were almost enough to make her forget that they were vampires, that their sudden roommate had water bottles laced with vervain, and that Klaus's line had been busy when she'd tried calling him about it. In this moment—which they'd orchestrated specifically to prove that they were normal human freshmen—she almost felt like a normal human freshman. And no matter how much she loved being a vampire, that was still a good feeling, especially after the day she'd had.

It was right about there in her train of thought that they both smacked right into the invisible barrier at the door.

"What?" Elena murmured, putting a hand up and pressing it against the force field.

"Someone must own this house," Caroline realized. "We haven't been invited in!"

"Damn it!" Elena hissed as a few students shouldered past them.

"Hey, blow-off girl!" Jesse the interested Junior greeted them. Still focused on the whole stuck-at-the-threshold issue, Caroline froze up for a moment before she remembered her cool disinterest when he'd introduced himself and handed them a flier at the new student luncheon.

"Flier guy," she greeted him back with a bitchy arch of her eyebrows. Thankfully she was saved from having to interact with him further because someone else ducked around him to join in the conversation. Not thankfully at all, that someone was Megan, the mysterious vampire-knowledgeable roommate.

"Hey guys!" she greeted them. "You coming in?"

"Um," Elena started, looking awkward.

"In a few minutes," Caroline responded quickly, pushing Elena back a little, and leaning in to stage whisper to Megan. "This song reminds her of her ex."

"Oh, totally!" Megan exclaimed as Caroline put an arm around Elena and led her away. "Well, I'm gonna go hang," she added, turning and vanishing into the crowd. The vampires, in their turn, faded into the night, rounding the corner, then pausing at the side of the house once they'd confirmed there were no loiterers to overhear them.

"Quick save," Elena sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingers.

"God only knows if it worked," Caroline grumbled, pulling out her phone. "She just saw us get stuck at the threshold, Elena. If the plan is to make her think we're human, then that plan is failing in record time."

"What are you doing?" Elena asked as her blonde friend fired up Google.

"Trying a hail-Mary internet search to find out who owns the school," Caroline responded. "It's a private school, so they might have the owners listed on their website, or something about people who live in Whitmore House."

"Good idea," Elena said, leaning against the wall and closing her eyes. "This college thing was _not_ supposed to be this complicated."

"Which is what I've been saying all day," Caroline muttered as she scrolled through paragraph after paragraph of useless information and endorsements for the school.

A few minutes later, just as Caroline was about to admit defeat and suggest making up a story about not feeling very well and turning in early—then replacing the vervain water with regular water, getting Megan off the stuff, and compelling her to take a leap of faith and transfer to somewhere in California—Elena's phone rang.

"When did you get Megan's number?" Caroline asked quietly as Elena pulled it out.

"While you were busy being as mean as humanly or inhumanly possible," Elena responded with a raised eyebrow before answering.

"Hey, Megan," she greeted her, but before she could say anything else, both vampires heard the running footsteps and frantic gasps for breath—both through the phone, and faintly from the top floor of the building behind them.

"Elena?" Megan screamed, "please, you have to help me! He's chasing me!"

"What? Who's… we can't get in," Elena stuttered, taking a few steps back to try and glimpse any movement through the windows. "The… line's too long. Come outside!" Caroline did a full body wince at the horrendous lie—how Elena had kept the secret of vampires existing she had no earthly idea—and then gasped as she heard the clatter of Megan dropping her phone, and the muffled scream of someone with a hand over their mouth.

"Megan!" She shouted, realizing that the sound was coming from this side of the house. "Megan, the window! We're out here! Oh, damn it," she hissed, bending her knees and preparing to spring up and grab the ledge. She couldn't get into the house, but if some sleaze ball was doing what she thought he was doing, she could throw a rock through the window with lethal consequences. Adding 'impossible rescue' to the things they would have to compel away hardly made things any more complicated than they were. But before she could jump, she heard another person—a masculine person—shout in pain, and then a horribly familiar snap of bones. A moment later, the window she'd intended to break shattered from within, and Megan's limp body fell amid a rain of glass shards.

Elena jumped up and caught her with unerring vampire reflexes, but it was immediately clear from how horribly askew her head was that she was dead, neck broken.

"Oh my god," Elena gasped. Caroline swallowed.

"Put her down," she commanded quietly. "Elena, now! Someone will have heard that." Obediently, Elena laid her down on the glass-strewn lawn and stepped back, only to gasp on shock when Caroline grabbed her head, and rammed it so hard into the ground that both girls started smelling more blood, and Megan's corpse flailed about once from the impact, undoing the gentle way Elena had deposited her.

"How were you going to explain the complete lack of impact trauma?" Caroline asked grimly before Elena could speak. "If she was alive, you would have saved her, but she's not, so we need to save _us_. Get the glass out of your hair," she added, rooting around in her purse and handing Elena the mini comb she always carried. Elena nodded, shaken but realizing the gravity of their situation, and in a few strokes had dislodged the glittering shards from her hair, and shaken a few off her shoulders. Hearing approaching footsteps and concerned voices, the vampires shared a look before speeding off to hide in the tree line.

"That was quick thinking," Elena whispered after they watched the reactions of the first few people to stumble upon the body.

"Yeah, my mom…" Caroline started, but then swallowed, and thought better of it, "was a cop," she finished. "I know how cops think." Elena nodded silently, and wrapped her arms around her taller friend, leaning her head into her shoulder as they watched the police arrive and set up a perimeter. Caroline rested her head on top of Elena's.

"Did you see her neck?" Elena asked quietly. "The bite mark?"

"Yeah," Caroline responded. "Looks like somebody got a mouthful of vervain and didn't react kindly.

"Guess it wasn't us she was worried about," Elena muttered darkly.

"Guess we'll have to find out who it was," Caroline sighed back.

This morning's hope for a normal, fun college experience had, by evening, turned into a hope that she wouldn't spend the next four years becoming an expert at hiding causes of death.

Yep, their schoolyear was off to a propper Mystic Falls start.


	3. Truthseeking

_Caroline's whole body was immobile, paralyzed in a standing position, feet anchored to a spot on the grass. The flames surrounding her,_ consuming her _, had risen so high that the nearby treetops were starting to smoke. Strangers milled around, working coolly to put out the fire in the surrounding foliage, but not a single person came to her aid. They saw her—she saw eyes sliding over her and the blinding blaze around her from time to time—but no one moved to put her out. She screamed and shouted and struggled, but in true dream fashion her voice made no sound, and she couldn't move an inch._

He _stood a safe distance from her, arms folded as he contemplates the rising flames, face impassive, as unruffled as if all that burned was lifeless, mindless wood._

" _Klaus," she tried again, but no matter how loudly she shouted, the words became trapped in the thick, black and blue smoke, rising up to the sky and blowing away on the wind. "Klaus,_ please _, just see me! Notice me!_ Please _!"_

Caroline awoke abruptly, inhaling sharply through her nose but managing not to jerk or scream. She blinked, eyes and other senses searching the room for what had woken her, and discovered that a totally unimportant Facebook notification had caused her phone to vibrate. She had no missed calls, messages or voicemails from Klaus, so he probably hadn't yet received her voicemail about Megan's tragic and concerning fate. Irritably, she turned her phone on silent and flipped it over so she wouldn't see it light up, in hopes that she might get some sleep.

Settling back into bed, she curled up with an armful of her quilts hugged to her chest. Her dream had been disturbing, but she supposed that moving out of the only town she'd ever known, her roommate being mysteriously murdered on the first day on what she'd expected to be a reasonably safe campus, and the fact that her normally-so-attentive-he-came-across-as-stalker-ish boyfriend hadn't responded to that particular piece of news had probably rattled her subconscious more than she expected.

It wasn't like she was in a situation where she _needed_ him to rescue her, of course. Besides which, Caroline Forbes wasn't one who typically sat back and waited to be rescued; one hungry vampire and one clearly inexperienced and now dead hunter weren't much of a threat to her, and certainly not the kind that required a murderous Original Hybrid to solve. But she'd gotten used to Klaus always being there for her, immediately, usually in the same room. Probably her dream was just her old insecurities translating themselves into more vampiric terms.

Who would've thought she'd get so violently homesick so incredibly fast?

With a sigh as she realized just how perfectly "awake" her brain was, she reached over onto the night table and grabbed one of her shiny new textbooks. Perhaps a better idea would be to thoroughly cram her mind with random facts she'd need in Intro Communication on Tuesday afternoon.

-0-

" _So, anyway, that's how my day ended… call me when you get this and tell me about yours, will you_?" Klaus sighed as the beep signaled the end of the message, and the little computerized voice asked for the sixth consecutive time if he'd like to save, delete or replay. Hitting the key to save it, he hung up and tried calling her for the fourth time since he'd noticed his missed call. Unfortunately, signal over the Atlantic ocean was just as spotty as it had been thirty minutes ago, and he still couldn't get through.

This was ridiculous, he thought resentfully, tossing his phone onto the seat opposite him in frustration and pouring himself a glass of scotch. He hadn't been looking forward to the next four years; he'd expected them to be incredibly tedious, while Caroline was off having her college experience most of the time. Boredom, he'd anticipated. Lots and lots of painting, he'd anticipated. Lazing about the house, bantering and occasionally having spats with Damon, he'd anticipated. He'd laid complex plans for various ways to lure Caroline away for romantic trysts as often as possible.

What he had not planned for was that danger would already be lurking there, waiting for her, ready to pounce on her first day, and threatening the one he loved. He'd gotten Terry a job on campus, of course, so there was a witch present if she needed one, and Caroline and her roommate were both vampires, so it wasn't like she was defenseless, but still—this turn of events did not bode well for the next half decade.

Then on top of that, there was the Alexander problem that he was on his way to deal with. The hunter had apparently managed to cheat death somehow, and had followed Rebekah and Matt across half of Europe, only to kidnap Matt and demand Rebekah in exchange as a ransom. He'd given her until sundown the next day to surrender, and if Klaus had done the math correctly, that left him only about an hour and a half from landing to the time that his ridiculous sister would _absolutely_ give herself up to save her sort-of boyfriend. That wasn't much time to work with, especially as he couldn't simply kill this hunter without incurring the Hunter's Curse, an experience he had no desire to repeat.

"She's gone one bloody day and suddenly there's trouble on all sides," he muttered, pouring himself another drink.

-0-

"Damon Salvatore, what a repetitive surprise," Katherine drawled as she answered the phone while twisting her hips to avoid a boulder that had appeared seemingly out of nowhere on the snowy slopes she was currently flying down on rented skis. "If you're having trouble in paradise, booty call elsewhere—I'm a bit busy at the moment."

"Ha, ha," Damon groused. "Yeah, do me a favor and don't ever, ever tell me about you getting _busy_ with an Original. Imagining Elijah without the suit is way too disturbing. I'm calling to see if you've heard from Stefan lately."

"Uh, busy? Original? Sex? Vacation?" Katherine responded, bending her knees to go under a low-hanging pine tree branch and catching sight of Elijah a few dozen yards to her left.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Damon shot back, "and you're all monogamous and everything, for at least the next week. Have you heard from him?"

"No," Katherine responded with a frown, angling herself so that her path would intersect with her lover's. "I thought Caroline kept tabs on him—call her."

"Yeah, I guess she's been doing this thing where she tries really hard _not_ to come off as needy and insecure," Damon sighed, "so she is neither fooling anyone nor communicating much with my brother—or the mysteriously silent Bonnie, for that matter."

"Why are you looking for him all of a sudden?" she asked, eyes narrowing. "Did something happen?"

"Well," Damon hedged, "at first I didn't think so—Elena chose me, Stefan left town to go find himself, he wasn't calling because he was pissed, but then this morning, our old buddy Silas comes to visit."

" _Silas is free_?" Katherine demanded, face turning serious in a second. Elijah's head whipped around to look at her as they skid side by side.

"Apparently so," Damon admitted. "Anyway, he was impersonating Stefan, said he had been all summer, and insinuated that he knew exactly why the real Stefan wouldn't be popping up to contradict him."

"Why would Silas allow you to retain the memory of his visit?" Elijah demanded, leaning in close to speak over the rushing wind. In a moment of unspoken agreement, he and Katherine split off a bit, then simultaneously turned their skis sideways to stop their descent.

"Hell if I know," Damon replied, "that's why I'm calling the manipulation expert who always has her finger on the pulse of things, especially when those things include my brother."

"I haven't heard anything," Katherine responded seriously. "But," she added quietly, and swallowed, feeling Elijah's eyes on her suddenly. "Was he last seen near water?" she asked.

"Yeah," Damon replied after a moment of confused silence. "Actually, the last time anyone saw him, he was on his way to the old quarry to drop Silas in it. Which would be a perfect place to hide a body, because it's dark, deep and secluded. Do I even want to know how you knew that?"

"Just call me when you find him," Katherine snapped, hitting the end call button and stuffing her phone back into her pocket.

"Katerina?" Elijah asked quietly. She looked up at him and sighed. This was the first time in her life that she'd actually felt guilty about thinking about another man while she was with someone, and this time it wasn't even sexual—or voluntary, for that matter. It was probably a testament to how badly she wanted her relationship with Elijah to work out.

"Those dreams I've been having, about drowning?" she explained. "It's not _me_ drowning in them. It's Stefan. I just thought I was having weirdo nightmares," she shrugged, pressing her fingertips into her forehead awkwardly, "but I've had that dream… I dunno, four times this summer, and it's always the same dream? I was starting to wonder if something was up."

"It seems your instincts were correct," Elijah responded, with none of the judgement in his voice that she'd been concerned about, and she relaxed a little. "If Silas has indeed returned, then he will be after you for the cure," he added, eyebrows drawing darkly over his face. Katherine swallowed quietly; she hadn't quite gotten there yet, and that was a pretty terrifying thought.

"He'll assume that I'll run," she decided. "He'll scour the whole world for me—except, probably, the last place he was seen, because I'd have to be suicidal to return there."

"Making Mystic Falls the safest town on the planet for you," Elijah finished for her.

"Boring place to hide," Katherine grumbled.

"I can think of worse places," Elijah responded, sweeping his thumb across her cheek. "And keeping you safe is my first priority."

"Well, the company is indefinitely better than the last time I had to run for my life from an immortal maniac," Katherine laughed, trying to brush off how badly her knees were shaking. "But I think as far as today goes, we still have time to do the other black diamond slope."

"Lead the way," Elijah said, but his face didn't quite relax. Katherine was supposed to be _safe_ now—not on the run two months after he'd finally forged an uneasy truce between her and Niklaus…

-0-

"Okay, that's the last of it," Caroline sighed as she pretended to struggle with hefting the final cardboard box of Megan's stuff and place it on the stack in the hallway. The school was meant to be sending someone to come in and collect everything, but after the housing fiasco they'd already dealt with this semester, Caroline wasn't about to wait for them. Let the boxes be in other people's way instead of just cluttering up their dorm room—maybe then they'd speed up the whole retrieval process. And whenever anyone was shocked at how coolly she'd been removing all evidence of their dead roommate, Elena would pull them aside and explain that Caroline had just lost her mother last Spring, so it was really important to her to make sure there was nothing in their room that reminded her of death.

The Doppelganger in question chose that moment to appear at the end of the hallway, so when Caroline reentered their room, she left the door ajar.

"I stopped by the campus hospital today," Elena announced, closing the door with her boot heel and holding up a piece of paper. "Made a quick copy of Megan's death certificate. Cause of death is listed as suicide, just like they said last night."

"Well, if you were feeling homesick, this is exactly like Mystic Falls," Caroline sighed, letting her hair down from the high tail she'd tied it in to clean.

"Yeah, and get this," Elena responded, showing Caroline the copy, "the guy who signs off on cause of death, the medical professional involved in Whitmore's supernatural-dealing-with team? He's a member of the faculty. A Doctor Wes Maxfield." Caroline frowned at the name, already planning on how to quietly start investigating him.

"AKA, our new applied microbiology professor," Elena continued brightly, flipping a page to show two copies of student's schedules. Hers, and Caroline's, edited to include Applied Microbio, MBIO-203…

"Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 10 to 11:30?" Caroline read indignantly, snatching the schedule and glaring at it. "Elena, you _deleted my Intercultural class_!"

"I know, I know, and I'm sorry," Elena sighed, "but we need to get on top of this before this gets on top of us. Think about it. Damon survived living in Mystic Falls for so long by getting in with the Founders' Council. We can do the same thing here. You can take Intercultural Communication next semester." Caroline sighed irritably, running a hand through her hair and gripping a fist full of it at the crown of her head.

"Fine," she grumbled. She knew that Elena was technically right, and it _was_ a good plan. But she'd been so determined to take that intercultural class, not dive right into the hard sciences. Elena squeezed her hand, then grabbed her makeup caboodle and headed into the bathroom to get ready. Caroline sat down on her bed, pulling out her phone. She'd woken up that morning to discover that Klaus had called her around 6, and she'd missed it because she'd turned her phone on silent. His message had said something about Rebekah having some sort of emergency abroad and him not having any signal until that moment. She'd texted him to let him know that she was most likely not in any immediate danger, and just now he'd responded with a demand that she keep him updated, and call him the moment a real threat emerged.

[Oh,] she texted back, [Don't you worry about _me_. Right about now, I don't envy the next person who makes my day worse.]

Thirty minutes later, both girls filed into Maxfield's lecture hall, with Elena babbling bits of hometown gossip Damon had shared with her on the phone that morning. It was a ploy, Caroline knew from lots of experience of using it herself; a distraction from the fact that she was upset about her new class schedule. But she squared her shoulders and played along, trying with every fiber of her being to be mature about this, and all the while pocket-texting Klaus now that he had signal.

"Oh, and Tripp Cooke—that overgrown eagle scout leader?—I guess he's being sworn in as sheriff next week," Elena added in a more serious voice as they took their seats.

"Hmm," Caroline acknowledged, before doing a double-take as she recognized the name. "Wait, Tripp _Fell_?" she checked with a smirk. "Mr. Haul-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, kiddo?" she imitated the way he'd sounded whenever they heard him talking to his troop. "That guy is serving and protecting us? I feel safer already," she snorted.

"Well, at least he's probably too dumb to come up with anything good to get the vampires out of town," Elena muttered with a shrug.

"Yes, there is that," Caroline agreed almost inaudibly as Dr. Maxfield himself entered the room and introduced himself as pretentiously as possible.

[Geez,] she texted Klaus under the desk. [This guy could give _you_ a run for your money in terms of ego…]

[Is that a challenge, sweetheart?] he responded, and she snickered quietly as she quickly responded in the negative.

"Isn't that right, texting girls in the back?" Maxfield demanded in a voice like a gunshot. Caroline's head snapped up, her auditory memory supplying the second half of a disturbing story about bodies and bonfires. In her peripheral vision, she noticed that Elena had quickly lowered her hand so that her own phone was beneath the desk, and was looking up just as guiltily.

"And what is that bacteria?" Maxfield demanded, still looking up at the two of them with the most superior expression Caroline thought she'd ever seen on anyone's face—and she was dating the biggest megalomaniac she knew.

"I, uh," Elena stuttered, as Caroline reflexively ran a hand through the textbook, wondering if by some miracle the answer would be in bold, highlighted, and leap off the page.

"I… I don't know," Elena finally admitted after a few painfully awkward seconds.

"That is because you're a freshman and don't belong in this class," Maxfield responded flatly. "The answer to that is something you will learn in bio-101. Down the hall." He pointed in the general direction of the freshman class, and then stood there expectantly.

Waiting for them to stand up, gather their things, and leave his all-important lecture.

Caroline sat there, stunned, every eye in the classroom furtively darting at her and Elena and then back down to notebooks and phones. The silence dragged on as Dr. Maxfield's arm continued to gesture widely at the door.

This couldn't be happening.

After the week she'd been having, after Elena taking her out of the class she was most excited for in an attempt to investigate this guy, after all the things that happened to make them think they had to investigate him in the first place… they couldn't be "stuck at the doorway;" not again.

She let the cover of her glossy, overpriced Microbio textbook fall shut, and pressed her palm against it.

"What is power distance, and how does it function within academic micro-culture?" she demanded, rage boiling out of her in words. Maxfield looked nonplussed—his arm drooped a little.

"Beg your pardon?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Of all the information human beings receive within a given act of communication, what percentage comes from words?" she continued, crossing her arms and raising an eyebrow to match him. He dropped his gesturing hand and crossed his arms as well.

"What are you talking about?"

"At what point did you lose the attention of sixty percent of the students in this classroom? Support your answer by listing and translating their nonverbal cues, and tell me what you could have done differently to keep them engaged."

Maxfield just blinked at her. He wasn't the only one—every eye in the classroom was on her; even Elena's.

"You're saying that because we don't _already know_ our way around applied microbiology, we don't belong in your class," she explained before he could get his wits about him and tell her to leave again. "I'm saying—demonstrating, actually—that because you don't know much about communication, you don't belong _teaching_ this class." She paused for effect as shock crackled through the classroom like static in the air before a massive electrical storm.

"Or," she finished, "possibly, we are here as students… to _learn_. And you are here as a professor to guide us effectively in that process. So, no, I don't know yet what bacteria causes the smell of rotting bodies. But I do know that, according to the Office of Advising, we have as much right to be in this class as anybody else."

There was a long, uncomfortable pause, during which the students alternated staring at Caroline and staring at Dr. Maxfield.

"Provided your grades stay up to scratch," Maxfield finally shot back, eyes narrowing, issuing a challenge. Caroline smiled sweetly.

"Won't be a problem," she retorted.

' _Thank God I couldn't sleep last night_ ,' she thought with a wave of relief as Dr. Maxfield cleared his throat and erased the board to start filling it up with illegible notes.

"Wow," Elena breathed, clearly still stunned.

"Ssh," Caroline hissed. "You heard him—we're gonna have to concentrate or he'll fail us and drop us from the course."

' _Of course, that means I_ still _don't get to take intercultural…_ ' she thought sourly. ' _I should've let us get kicked out_.'

-0-

Silas leaned back in the driver's seat of the car he'd stolen and parked on Whitmore's campus, close enough to the bonfire that he could watch Elena drag Damon towards her dorm room for angry sex with a side of murder, but far enough away that no one would get a good look at his face in the darkness.

 _One_ Caroline Forbes was bad enough to have to work around, but he'd discovered upon coming within range that now Damon Salvatore's thoughts were oddly garbled, and difficult to read. Apparently, she'd figured out how to pass on her immunity, but luckily for him, she hadn't given it to her best friend just yet. Convincing Elena to get rid of Damon for him had been as easy as usual. He would have liked to tell her to kill both of them, but he knew perfectly well that in a fair fight, Caroline would beat Elena without even breaking a sweat. With Damon, Elena's sexuality was an advantage that should tilt the scales in her favor, and he didn't want her to get her priorities confused if she saw both of them at once.

On the upside, however, there was that wonderfully disturbed Dr. Maxfield, who already didn't like Caroline. It wouldn't take much to make him suspicious, and then he could deal with her, _his_ way. Silas wouldn't have to lift a finger, and could instead focus intently on accomplishing his own goals.

-0-

When Klaus called, Caroline was sitting in the wide window, looking down at the parking lot where Damon and Elena were packing Elena's overnight bag in the trunk of Damon's car.

"Hey," she greeted him, continuing to observe the other two vampires out of the corner of her eye. "How's it going over there?"

"Hurry up and wait," Klaus grumbled. "Everyone's favorite quarterback is safely back to annoy everyone, but—"

"Wait, what?" Caroline cut him off, sitting up straight. "Matt was in danger? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I left to daringly rescue him and couldn't call you from the middle of the Atlantic," he responded, and she could just about hear the way he'd fling his arms (or free arm, in this case) wide, and roll his shoulders back when he was responding loudly to accusations. "Point is, he's quite safe and sound, but now there's the small matter of Alexander returned from the underworld. Rebekah's boyfriends have always been a thorn in my side, but this debacle is a new low," he grumbled. Caroline was stuck between concern—mostly for Matt—and humor at just what happened when Klaus got involved in Rebekah's train wreck of a love life.

"Gotta be some kind of record," she sighed. "First boyfriend versus last boyfriend." Down below, a third figure approached the leaving vampires. "Hold up," she muttered as she recognized the intruder. "Creepy professor alert," she added, realizing that Klaus couldn't see what she was reacting to. "Go on—how is Alexander back from the dead?"

"He was rather mum on the subject, but I noticed he still had the Gilbert death-cheating ring he removed from Matt last spring; I imagine there's a correlation."

"Can't be," Caroline mused with a frown. "It doesn't work on hunters, otherwise Jeremy would've come back when Silas drained him, right?"

"Which will be question number one as soon as I get my hands on him," Klaus sighed. "Until then, all I know is that he's back, he's rather upset, and Rebekah appears to be the main target for his ill-conceived and prematurely doomed revenge."

"Be careful," Caroline murmured, suddenly remembering the Hunter's Curse and shivering a little at the thought of what he'd endured the last time Alexander had had a killable physical body.

"Don't worry, Love," Klaus chuckled a little "I'm not one for making the same mistake twice. Now, what's the story with your nefarious doctor?"

"Don't know yet," she murmured, halfway tuning into the conversation occurring down in the parking lot.

"What?" Klaus asked mockingly, "I thought this was the girl who had Stefan Salvatore's life story right down to his favorite color between third and fourth period on the first day you saw him. Surely after thirty-six hours, you've got a bit more than that."

"Hey," Caroline grumbled, "first of all, I was drunk when I told you that—bad form bringing it up when I'm sober. Second, that was his _cover_ story I got—the real one didn't materialize until after I had sex with his brother. Something tells me that strategy's not going to work too well in this scenario." Klaus snarled quietly, and she smirked. "I didn't think so," she added smugly. "He's apologizing," she realized in an irritated mutter, tuning back into her eavesdropping.

"Oh, excellent form. Obvious ploy," Klaus commented.

"I'll say. Not to _me_ ," she corrected. "To Elena. He's 100% willing to spill his guts to her, of course. What else is new."

"Do you think he'd tell her anything of value?" Klaus asked, clearly weighing the risks in his mind. They both knew Elena wouldn't spot a lie as easily as Caroline, but for whatever ridiculous doppelganger magic reason, she had an in.

"I think she's not going to stick around long enough to find out," Caroline responded as Elena politely shut Maxfield down and climbed into Damon's car. "And I think I'm in too much of a hurry to wait until she gets back. Third day of school," she sighed, "one dead roommate, one traveling roommate, one mysterious undead neighbor, one dropped class, six unnecessary microbiology credits, and this complete douche with a doctorate, a god-complex and the necessary authority to cover up a vampire attack."

"Sounds like your year is off to a _spectacular_ start," Klaus laughed. "What will you do?"

"I'll be a damn honor's student after all," Caroline shrugged as she watched Damon and Elena drive away and Maxfield slowly turn and head back to wherever the hell he'd appeared from. "This Doctor Wes seems to have me confused with some other girl—one who takes 'no' for an answer."

Klaus laughed a little at that. "I imagine he won't be making that mistake again."

"You imagine right," Caroline snarled softly.

"Have I ever mentioned how indescribably attractive you are when you're plotting, my dear?" he asked, and she could hear the grin in his voice.

"You could stand to bring it up more often," she responded playfully.

"If all goes well here, I'll be there soon to see it in person," he promised. "Until then, and _I know what you're going to say_ ," he preempted, "but humor me; be cautious? Let Terry know where you are if you do any hands-on investigating, at least?"

"Thought she wasn't a babysitter?" Caroline muttered, eyes narrow.

"She's not—she's backup. Semi-retired, gainfully employed, powerful magical… _backup_."

"Uh-huh," Caroline replied flatly, looking down her nose in disapproval at midair, since her boyfriend wasn't there to be glared at, smirk, shrug and make sarcastic comments to her face.

"I'll have this sorted soon enough," Klaus assured her. "Then I'll be back—if you leave anything for me to _do_ , miss 'doesn't take no for an answer.'" he added playfully.

"You'll just have to settle for me then," she murmured.

"Oh, there was never any doubt of that, Love," he responded, using that tone that never failed to send a thrill through her stomach, and heat across her face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The scene where Caroline shames Dr. Maxfield is based loosely on a story I read online about who qualifies as a "real fan" of something. I can't take credit for that strategy, but I thought it was amazing, so I copied it. All communication theory is stuff I learned in college—I have a comm degree, so I can, in fact, take credit for that part. (Incidentally, only 7% of communication is verbal, the rest comes from nonverbals like tone, body language, speed, etc. The other two have much longer and more complicated answers—not really suited to a brief author's note.)


	4. My Crime was Love

Klaus sighed, narrowed eyes trained on the broken corpse at his feet. It had been more artistic last time he supposed, but he couldn't deny a certain bias. He'd been going for dramatic flare when he'd killed Alexander 900 years ago; drove a sword through his chest to pin him to a wall like a bug on a card. It had later become his signature style when he wanted to send one particular message: _your leader is dead, and no one can save you now_.

Obviously he'd paid for it; a few hours later his mind had turned in on itself, warped and tormented by five dead hunters' attempts to take his life in revenge for their own. But that image would always strike him as a moment of raw power; hefting a body against the wall and suspending them by the very blade that would end their life. (Granted, he'd lost quite a few swords doing that, but it was worth it for the final product.)

This time, Alexander lay where he'd been dumped haphazardly, neck broken, hair bound off to the side rather than in the unkempt mess that had shaded his previous "final expression" so artistically. He was growing cold faster than the average dead human, likely because he'd been dead to begin with, only kept in the world of the living by the spell on the ring which Rebekah had already removed in the hopes that he would vanish into thin air, and the curse with him.

They should be so lucky.

Now there was nothing to do but wait. Rebekah was pacing back and forth across the abandoned warehouse they'd battled in, all nervous energy and suppressed fear. Matt sat with his legs dangling off of an upturned crate, his toes barely scuffing the floor, hands in his lap, breathing steady.

To any onlooker, it would appear that Rebekah was the one with the supernatural axe hanging over her head.

Perhaps everyone's particular favorite quarterback had more nerve than Klaus had credited him with.

It was right about the time that it occurred to Klaus to give Caroline a call, as much to pass the time as to update one another on supernatural messes, that he heard Matt's sharp intake of breath, and saw him stiffen and sit up straight, eyes fixed on a shadowy corner. His lips were pressed together grimly.

"It's started," Klaus murmured. It wasn't a question, but Matt nodded curtly.

"Dead guy, ten o'clock," he said, a quiver in his voice. "He seems pissed," he finished, after clearing his throat so that he could speak in a calmer, flatter tone.

"What do we do, Nik?" Rebekah demanded helplessly.

"Contact a witch, and pray to any god or devil who might listen," Klaus responded darkly, dialing Bonnie Bennet for the third time since Matt's completely accidental snapping of Alexander's neck. One of her best friends was in mortal peril of the highest order; why in _hell_ wasn't she picking up?

-0-

The foreign smell of U.S. air hit Katherine as it always did when she'd been in Europe for long enough to become unused to it. As they exited the terminal, Elijah wordlessly produced a small umbrella from his luggage and hit the button to unfold it over both of their heads, shielding her perfect curls from the light drizzle. She wove her arm through his and leaned slightly into him as they spotted the Uber they'd ordered upon landing.

This was a new feeling for Katherine—the sensation of being off-balance and a little guilty for thinking about another man while someone she was with stood right next to her. And it wasn't even voluntary this time—or sexual. This time it was the simple fact that she cared about Stefan and wanted him safe, but she also cared about Elijah, and wanted to be with him, truly and exclusively.

She supposed that this was going to be the real test of their relationship.

-0-

"It's not a form of magic I've ever felt before," Emilia sighed, removing her potion-covered fingertips from Matt's temples and shaking her head in defeat. "It doesn't even follow the same rules. Are you sure it's a curse, as such?"

"Yes we're bloody sure," Rebekah snapped, "why do you think we came to you in the first place?"

"You're going to want to take a more careful look," Klaus snarled softly. "A witch did this, a witch can undo this. If you're not the one for the job, I see no reason for you to remain on this earth."

Emilia gulped audibly, but obediently returned her fingers to Matt's temples.

"Guys, knock it off," Matt sighed, eyes shifting uneasily to Alexander and then back to the Originals breathing down the witch's neck. "You tried to find a cure for 50-some years when it was you, right?" he took Klaus's stone-faced silence as assent. "So if this isn't something a witch can fix, there's no reason to punish her for not being able to do it. I mean, _we_ came to _her_ , remember?" Rebekah huffed and tossed her hair over her shoulder but backed off a bit. Klaus's eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched, unwilling to admit that the younger vampire had a point.

"Perhaps it has to be the _same_ witch," Emilia suggested quietly. "Or just the same kind of witch. I mean, there's obviously something magical going on in your head, but it's nothing like what I work with. It's like trying to turn a straight-blade screw with a Phillip's head screwdriver—just doesn't work."

"Yes thank you for the mechanical simile," Klaus growled, "it's _really_ worth what we're paying you just to say that you don't have the power to get the job done."

"Well I doubt we'll have any luck on the same witch," Rebekah sighed. "The one responsible for this mess has been dead for two thousand years."

"Not necessarily," Matt responded slowly, and both Originals looked at him with eyebrows raised. "Well, someone had to do a spell to make that ring work on the supernatural, right?" he continued with a shrug. "It would have had to be someone extremely powerful, who probably already knew Alexander, and could trust him to be a good minion, right?"

Rebekah pulled the ring in question out of her pocket and tossed it towards Emilia, who caught it with a spell, then let it fall into her open palm.

"Thoughts?" she demanded. Emilia ran her fingertips over the ring, then shuddered, and handed it back.

"Same type of magic," she confirmed. "Probably the same witch, yeah. What did you stumble into?"

Matt laughed humorlessly.

"Something way far out of my league, it looks like," he responded.

Klaus felt the ghost of a cold shiver run down his spine. Silas had been bad enough—now possibly an equally old but infinitely more powerful witch might be roaming the earth in search of devil-only-knew-what, likely with a vendetta against vampires.

-0-

Stefan awoke to the smell of floorboards and dusty carpeting. For a moment, that was all he perceived, and it was the most relaxing thing he'd ever smelled in his life; the stability and hominess of an ordinary floor and an old carpet that could use a good vacuuming. Then he smelled the other person in the space—heard the wet rushing of blood and felt the uncontrollable burning in his throat.

He shot upright, his eyes finding the human immediately, and he had just enough of his wits about him to jerk back.

"I don't want to hurt you," he rasped, "so get away from me before I rip your throat out."

The woman raised a single, unimpressed eyebrow, and reached into a basket beside her.

"Hello to you too," she greeted him coolly, pulling out a blood bag and offering it to him. "I brought dinner."

Hesitating only for a moment, Stefan snatched the bag from her hand and drained it in a series of desperate gulps.

"A vampire doppelgänger who's burdened by a conscience," the woman sighed thoughtfully. "Now I've seen everything. This is even weirder than that little Mikaelson witch, and she really takes the cake."

Through Stefan's blissful haze of relief as the blood entered his stomach and the burning in his throat began to ease, he had just enough brain power left to find it odd that someone would refer to Esther as "little."

-0-

"They're still in Nördlingen," Nadia sighed into her phone. She sat on the patio of a little café, just close enough that she could hear the discussion going on between the Original vampires and the unlucky local witch they were trying to hire in the building down the street, and just far enough away that her phone conversation would blend in with the street noise. "It seems one of them has killed the resurrected Hunter and is suffering the consequences."

"Oh, excellent," Silas laughed humorlessly on the other end, "tell me it's Klaus, I'd love for him to suffer."

"I think it's Matt, actually," Nadia murmured. If the immortal noticed the faint note of regret in her voice, he didn't deem it important enough to comment on.

"In any case, the Hunter was sent to keep their attention, which means my vengeful ex wants to work uninterrupted," he decided. "Head back to the U.S.; we'll need to throw a wrench in the works with Quetsiya before my plans can advance."

"Not so fast, mister," Nadia muttered, standing up and paying her bill before meandering down the street. "Don't forget about our bargain. I'm not just helping you out of the goodness of my heart."

"I know, I know, fear not," Silas responded, and she could imagine him waving her off even though she couldn't see his body language. "My sources report that Katherine Pierce will be arriving in Mystic Falls within the hour. Doppelgangers are so wonderfully predictable," he added, mostly to himself.

"I'll be there by tomorrow," Nadia promised, picking up the pace once she was well out of earshot of the witch's shop. She almost regretted having that bad luck curse placed on the young vampire's daylight ring when they'd met in Prague.

Almost.

But now it seemed that Silas and Quetsiya had had the same idea—get the Originals out of the way as much as possible, make Katherine feel threatened and drive her to the only place where she'd successfully hidden so that they could get their hands on the cure. Nadia couldn't quite decide if she hoped Katherine would show up, or if she wanted her to be cleverer than that, and run far, far away.

She also wondered how far the eternal cat-and-mouse game Quetsiya and Silas were playing could really go. A witch who'd lived two millennia on the Other Side, observing people's decisions and predicting the outcomes, versus an immortal who'd spent the last two-thousand years perfecting his ability to manipulate people into draining themselves dry. They were as closely matched as it was possible to be, in the Bulgarian vampire's opinion.

If she wanted a chance to meet her birth mother, for revenge or joyous reunion, she was going to have to do it fast, before unstoppable force met immovable object and everything blew itself to hell around them…

-0-

When Caroline saw Tyler's face pop up on the screen of her phone, she froze, mind in a frenzy of confusion, anger, curiosity, nostalgia, and something vampiric and violent that came to the surface whenever she thought about the fact that he'd used her compassionate nature against her, nearly at the cost of her life.

"Do you need to take that?" Jessie asked, and Caroline jerked up, remembering that she was in a study room in the campus library with her T.A., not staring blankly at her phone for an unnaturally long time in the privacy of her own dorm.

"Um," she started, "yeah," she decided, curiosity winning out over her other emotions. "I'll just be a minute." He hadn't made any contact with her since he'd bitten her and left her for dead, so whatever he was calling for had to be one hell of an emergency. At the very least she wanted to know what it was about.

"What do you want?" she demanded flatly by way of greeting, standing up and exiting the study room to find a secluded area among the stacks. This early in the semester there weren't that many panicked bio majors crowding into the higher-level research portion of the library, so privacy was easy to come by.

"Hi, Caroline," Tyler responded awkwardly. "Um, I guess I should start by apologizing—"

"If you're not totally sure, then don't even bother, just hang up," Caroline hissed. It wasn't like he'd stood her up or door-dinged her car. Asking her to run away with him and then biting her when she said no wasn't a matter for a casual, forced "sorry, sweetie."

"Look," he sighed after a long moment of silence where she imagined him struggling with himself. "I'm not calling to re-hash what happened with us. I know what I did was… inexcusable. I'm calling because someone needs your help, and Nia isn't picking up." So, she thought, interest piqued, Nia was his first attempt. That at least narrowed down the subject matter.

"She's a grad student," she reminded him. "She's busy. As am I at the moment, so get to the point."

"I just need the recipe for the original version of balance tea," he explained quickly. "I remember how to make the hybrid version, but I think I'm missing some stuff for the original version."

"Huh," Caroline mused. "Well, no one can say you aren't loyal to your own kind, at least."

"Actually," he corrected her, "this isn't for a werewolf." Caroline frowned, her mouth turning down at the corners.

"That's kind of what it's for," she reminded him.

"Yeah," he continued, and she could hear him scratching the back of his head. "You'll never guess what happened, actually."

"I have a feeling you're about to tell me," she prompted, leaning back against the nearest set of shelves.

"Well, we settled down—no offense, but I'm not saying where—and Dominick gets involved with this human chick, Jayla. Of course, nobody thought anything was going to happen, with him being part vampire, so it wasn't like they were trying _not_ to—"

"Tyler Lockwood, if you're about to say that you interrupted my very important school day over a mystical, magical, _fictional_ Twilight baby," Caroline cut him off, but he interrupted her.

"It's real though, Care," he insisted. "At first we all thought she cheated, but the more pregnant she gets, the more we can all sense it in her. And… there are other side effects." His voice turned dark. Suddenly, the situation clicked.

"Her body's rejecting the pregnancy," Caroline guessed quietly.

"Yeah," Tyler confirmed with a sigh. "She started getting sick two months ago. We just thought it was the flu so no one was really worried, but it's getting worse and worse. When we were studying lycanthropy back in the day, remember that 'moon-sickness' thing you read about?"

Caroline remembered. She remembered long summer days sitting on the floor in the corner of the Mystic Falls public library, a foot of space between them filled with electricity as they pawed through old reference materials and scrolled through urban legends on Tyler's laptop. She also remembered reading about moon-sickness: an affliction that supposedly struck some mothers of werewolf babies who didn't have the wolf gene themselves. The legend said that it happened to the mothers of particularly strong werewolf children, which would make sense if there was any possibility that a _hybrid_ could reproduce.

"I'll email you the recipe," she told him quietly. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm in the middle of getting an expensive education, and I need to study."

"Thanks, Caroline," Tyler said, relieved. "I owe you. And Care?" he added as her finger hovered over the "end call" button. "I really am sorry."

Caroline's jaw clenched and she disconnected them without responding. She had enough in her head without thinking about forgiving him right now too. Someday she was sure she'd write down all of his wrongs and set fire to them, let them go, but right now, it still festered like an open wound, and talking to him was reminding her of just how angry the whole situation had made her.

Quickly locating the document on her phone where she'd saved the original recipe, she copied and pasted it into an email and sent it without any further message. Then she slowly folded her knees, crouching on the library floor as her head spun.

Somehow, hybrids could have children. The thought of it shocked her to her bones, and as her head whirled with the possibilities, she found herself trying to count back and remember when her last monthly had been. It took her a ridiculously long eight seconds to remember that she was a vampire, and therefore exempt from all of the hassle—and childbearing ability—that human women possessed. While a human woman who slept with a hybrid apparently could get pregnant, she would never have to worry about that.

Klaus would never have that.

That realization was like a bucket of cold water down the back of her neck. Klaus, with his obsession with family, his intense desire to find or create others _like him_ , could never have that with her, because she was a vampire.

Would he want it?

Would he want it badly enough to seek out a more compatible partner?

Would he resist, because he loved her more than anything, but then over time come to resent her for standing in the way of that opportunity?

If Caroline had overthought things as a human, it was nothing compared to the hurricane raging through her vampire mind at this moment, in Whitmore campus library. Every old fear and insecurity she'd battled all her life creeped up on her, until she was surrounded by an army of them, every one of them sneering that it had been too good to be true; that this would be the tremor in the fault line between them and shatter everything they'd built together, either quickly or slowly, but certainly painfully, and very possibly permanently.

And perhaps Caroline really hadn't changed all that much from when she was human. Perhaps she'd just made an effort to seem kinder, stronger, better than she had been before. Perhaps she was exactly as shallow and selfish as she'd been told.

Because at that moment, she very deliberately filed that piece of information away in the back of her head, where no one would ever find it; where, thanks to Klaus, it couldn't not even be wrung from her by compulsion.

He would never learn it from anyone else, that much was certain. The hybrids would be hiding themselves and their growing families from him for the rest of eternity.

And she could not—would not—risk losing him.

Straightening up, she deleted the sent email and her call history, emptied her trash, then stuffed her phone into her jeans pocket, ran a hand through her hair, swiped her fingers under her eyes in case they'd watered and dislodged her mascara, and headed back to the study-room she was sharing with Jessie. By the time she opened up the door, and apologetic smile on her face, she'd very nearly managed to forget the whole thing.

' _Never underestimate the allure of darkness, my darling,'_ murmured a dark voice in the back of her head that sounded suspiciously like Klaus's. _'Or the power of the purest heart to hide it away until they need to call upon it.'_

-0-

"I've washed the blood out of it," Rebekah announced quietly as she returned Matt's daylight ring; the witch had required him to remove it while she scanned him so there wouldn't be any foreign spells interfering in her readings. Slipping the heavy ring back on, Matt stared mesmerized at his hand, remembering how it had seemed to have a mind of its own. One moment, he was trying to throw a punch like a normal person, and the next he'd diverted mid-swing, using the momentum to slide forward and wrap an arm around the hunter's neck, breaking it effortlessly.

It was the first time he'd ever killed a human.

He supposed he should have been more upset about it, but the guy had already been dead, and had been trying to kill him, not to mention do anything and everything in his power to hurt Rebekah. So, on the whole, not a very _nice_ human.

"Says the vampire scum who killed me," Alexander snarled in his ear.

'You have _nothing_ better to do with your afterlife then bother me?' Matt thought loudly in the apparition's direction, wanting to put off looking like a crazy person who talks to thin air for as long as inhumanly possible.

"Thanks Becks," he said aloud. She pressed a kiss to his forehead, her hand lingering on his shoulder.

"I've got another witch—a mental specialist in Nepal," Klaus called from the other room where he'd just hung up the phone.

"You're being unusually helpful," Rebekah commented snidely.

"Matt's been unusually helpful both in protecting Caroline in various situations and in making you significantly less irritating of late, little sister," Klaus responded, leaning back in his chair so both vampires could see his smirk through the door.

"Besides," he added more soberly, standing and leaning against the doorframe as Rebekah was about to fire a return shot, "call it catharsis. I'm not going to turn down another chance to learn how to defeat the Hunter's Curse."

"Fair enough," Matt murmured, watching Alexander pace back and forth out of the corner of his eye. "Nepal, huh? When do we leave?"

"Immediately," Klaus responded. "Gather your things. The plane's being fueled as we speak."

-0-

"You still should have called us first," Katherine snapped for the sixteenth time as Stefan lay unconscious in the Salvatore's living room. "Four vampires—one of them an Original," she gestured towards Elijah, "could have dealt with the witch without letting her turn your brother's head into mush."

"Will you shut the hell up already?" Damon exclaimed. "I did what I could under the circumstances. It was _your_ brilliant idea to split up when there were too many bars to search."

"In my experience," Elijah supplied quietly, "there is almost no wound from which a vampire cannot heal. Stefan's ordeal at the hands of this Quetsiya character is regrettable, certainly, but it's unlikely he'll suffer any permanent damage."

Katherine sighed in frustration, wanting to argue—because witches and vampires did _not_ mix and _how_ did Elijah not know that?—but also not wanting to start a fight with him over Stefan, especially when they had, in fact, gotten him back.

"He's home now," Elena added placatingly as she slid Stefan's daylight ring tenderly back onto his limp finger, "and if there _is_ any real damage, I'm sure Bonnie will be willing to cut her trip short to fix it. It's _Stefan_ , after all."

"Yeah," Katherine muttered curtly, mentally cataloguing how many of her witch friends she could get to Mystic Falls before Bonnie could even book a flight. Relying on only one witch for witch business was such a rookie move.

Before anyone could say anything else, Stefan stirred, and four pairs of eyes immediately focused on him.

"Stefan!" Elena exclaimed happily as he blinked and turned to look for the source of the noise. "We're so glad you're okay!"

"Uh," Stefan muttered, slowly standing and rubbing his head, his eyes darting to each vampire in turn in confusion. "I'm sorry," he finally admitted, "but I have no idea who any of you people are."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so what am I going on about with different types of magic and Philips head screwdrivers? In a later chapter (once it won't be a spoiler) there will be a more in-depth explanation of my head canon on how magic works, but the short version for right now is this: there are two different basic types of magic. There's Balanced Magic (what your average witch does, Spirit Magic) and Wild Magic (Expression and Traveler magic both fall into this category—and frankly I think they're two names for the same thing, because it had to be Expression specifically that opened a tomb that Quetsiya, a Traveler, sealed; make sense?).
> 
> With Balanced Magic, you do your spell, you pay your price, you get your result. Generally things go according to recipe. With Wild Magic, you can use a ton more power than you'd normally be able to access, but the results are iffy (like how Bonnie couldn't really control Expression all that well and kept making earthquakes and hurting herself). Quetsiya was able to create the Immortality Spell with only Silas for help and no mention of channeling anyone or anything else because she was using Wild Magic, which is way more powerful.
> 
> This is why Emilia is so confused by what's going on in Matt's head—she's your garden variety witch using Spirit (Balanced) Magic, so Expression/Traveler/Wild Magic feels super weird and different. This is also why Klaus, who's always been good friends with many, many witches, couldn't just get one of them to say a spell and get the Hunter's Curse out of his head back in the day. Remember how Witches and Travelers don't like each other, and there just aren't that many Travelers left? So, yeah, that's what's going on there.


	5. Hell's Bells

Nepal was beautiful—this was something Matt knew.

He knew it because Tyler had gone there with his dad once for a vacation, and documented the whole trip on social media. He knew it because during this time, he'd googled the place in an ill-fated attempt to find it ugly; as undesirable as it was unobtainable for someone of his social and financial standing. He knew it because as they walked down the street towards the shop where Klaus's next witch practiced, Rebekah was pointing at the sights, describing them, talking about the memories she had of this place.

But he couldn't see any of it.

Instead, Alexander had placed a different landscape into his head—thick, acrid smoke obscuring his senses, hot, flickering red light from all sides, building dripping with gallons of blood, and piles of bones beneath his feet. The empty eye sockets of the skulls stared at him accusingly.

Pradeepta, the witch, didn't speak a word of English, but he could tell from everyone's tones when she was being helpful, when Rebekah thought she wasn't trying hard enough, when Klaus was trying to calm Rebekah, and when he, too, started losing patience. At first, Matt had tried to be placating—distracting Rebekah from her growing temper by asking for translations, cracking jokes, whatever he could do. But coping with both Alexander's invasion of his mind and two irritable Originals having a whole conversation that he couldn't understand was exhausting, and eventually he put his head between his knees and pressed his eyes shut.

He felt like he had bugs crawling all over his skin—that bit him in a hundred different places whenever he so much as twitched a muscle. And he knew that it was all in his head, it was the curse, but that didn't quell the urge to slap at them. Not for the first time, he envied Caroline and her impenetrable mind.

-0-

Caroline lounged on her picnic blanket, surrounded by textbooks and the sounds of an afternoon party, occasionally interspersed with the sound of ringing bells. To the casual observer, she would seem to be calmly invested in her studying, or perhaps slightly bored with her partner—the admittedly handsome college student currently organizing his flashcards. But a closer examination would have showed the truth.

She was laying in her side, but her whole body was rigid, radiating stress and agitation. One of her hands was tapping a pencil against the closest textbook, twitching with nervous energy. The other was digging into the hard-packed earth with deliberate force.

" _Just let me and Damon handle it,"_ Elena had insisted with Caroline had immediately started making a list of what she was going to do to help Stefan regain his memories. _"You have enough on your plate with investigating Dr. Maxfield and averything." 'And_ we're _his family.'_ Elena hadn't said the last bit, but Caroline had heard it loud and clear. Between that and the fact that she'd just learned that Matt was Hunters' Cursed halfway around the world, and even Klaus—the closest thing to an expert in the world—didn't know how to fix him… Helplessness wasn't a feeling Caroline Forbes handled terribly well.

And to top it off, her relationship with Klaus had become pretty public in Mystic Falls over the summer—quite the high school cautionary tale. While nobody dared say anything to her face when he was nearby, she was getting the most judgmental looks now that she was sitting there with Jesse. After all, it looked for all the world like she was using her sugar daddy's absence to immediately cheat on him at the first available moment. It help anything that Jesse kept flirting; she was seriously reconsidering her plan to use him to get into Maxfield's good graces. His romantic interest in her was almost certainly not worth the advantage that an attachment to him would give her.

Not for the first time this semester, she wondered if the whole college thing was worth how distant she had to be from the supernatural world in which she fit so well.

-0-

"Wait a sec," Matt called, shouting over the arguing supernaturals—and, admittedly, the sound of his mother and sister's agonized screaming, which Alexander was pulsing through his head to complete his little illusion of hell. He felt the attention in the room turn to him. It had been a while since he spoke, so this was to be expected, he supposed.

"The problem is magic types, right?" he checked. "We can't find any witches of the same type, right?"

"Right," Rebekah confirmed.

"And that type is, almost definitely, this Traveler magic stuff that Quetsiya used, right? The same thing Silas used?"

"Right," Klaus responded, still not sure where this was going.

"So," Matt finished, "if something blocked out Silas, then it might block this out too, right? Same type?"

"It might," Rebekah answered, eyebrows scrunched in confusion, at the same time that Klaus's eyes got wide and he mouthed a soft "oh" of comprehension.

"Did Caroline ever figure out how she was doing it that whole time?" Matt asked unnecessarily.

"She had a strong theory," Klaus responded quietly.

-0-

"Toga virus," Jesse said, breaking into Caroline's reverie and reminding her that she'd brought him out here to help her study where none of the other Whitmore Freshman would overhear her acting like a braniac. "Go."

"Causes congenital rubella," Caroline responded, never looking up from the textbook that she had memorized an hour ago.

"Okay hot-shot," Jesse laughed, "Red Queen Theory."

Caroline's mind brought up the relevant paragraph in the textbook, photographic vampire memory intersecting with her emotional centers. She'd liked that bit.

"A theory often used to explain the contradictory relationship between predator and prey," she murmured thoughtfully, mind bringing up images of her own predators—Katherine, her father, the tomb vampires, Klaus himself, Silas; there was a long list. Most of the time she didn't think too hard about it; it distracted her from trying to live her life in the real world—like a functional vampire, as she'd told Elena. But here, in the shadow of the trees, surrounded by death, the feeling of timelessness, and her relation to it was starting to impact her.

"And why does the supposedly weaker species always stay one step ahead?" Jessie prompted when she'd remained silent for an uncomfortably long period.

"Fear of extinction," she responded, sitting up and meeting Jesse's eyes gravely. "The rabbit is faster than the fox because the fox is chasing its dinner," she continued. "The rabbit is running for her life."

"Damn," Jesse exclaimed approvingly, either missing or ignoring her little slip up with the gender. "How did you learn all that so quickly?"

Caroline shrugged, arching one eyebrow. "Well," she explained simply, "whenever anyone tells me I can't do something, I prove them wrong." In that moment the balance of power and weakness, of humanity and inhumanity, was running through her veins. Another moment and she wasn't entirely sure what she might have done—gotten on a plane to Europe or dropped out of Whitmore, killing Maxfield casually on her way out. She felt like she was floating, like she'd grown so much bigger than everything around her had diminished in comparison…

Then, her phone went off, the little electronic sound interrupting… whatever had just happened in her mind. Shaking herself a little, she swallowed and swiped the green circle and held the phone to her ear to find out what Elena wanted now.

Her friends' needs shouldn't seem so small. The very thought made her shiver with revulsion as Elena sobbed out the story of how she'd lost track of Stefan, and begged her to keep an eye out.

'I have a dream,' Caroline thought wryly as she stood up and made up something about her friend drunkenly wandering off and how they had to find and stop him before he got behind the wheel of a car, 'that someday they won't wait until things have already exploded before admitting that they need my help.'

-0-

"You can't just bring somebody back from the dead. There is always a price to pay for it." Jeremy's voice was uncharacteristically low and serious, and just hearing it broke Bonnie's heart.

"Don't say it, Jeremy," she begged, her voice cracking. "Don't you dare."

"She didn't show up to her dad's funeral, Damon. Nobody has spoken to her all summer," Jeremy continued in almost a pleading tone, like he was desperate not to have to say it, desperate for Damon just to figure it out himself.

"Please, Jeremy," she whispered, trying to grip onto his arm but going right through him.

"You say it, and everything in Elena's life goes to crap, do you understand me?" Damon roared, face red with anger. "Everything changes."

"Do not say it, Jeremy," Bonnie echoed, for once in her life—well, death—on the same wavelength as Damon Salvatore.

"Don't," Damon whispered. Jeremy took a breath, swallowed, and looked the vampire in the eye.

"Bonnie's dead," he croaked out miserably.

-0-

"This is going to hurt like nothing you have ever endured before," Klaus warned as he approached Matt, who lay prone on the hotel room bed, determinedly looking the Hybrid in the eyes—rather than focusing on the grim image Alexander had created of Tyler's head rolling on the floor, his body in pieces in a trail to the bathroom. "It will probably take several doses—Caroline's been bitten three times."

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather we just lock you away nice and comfy until we can find a more humane way of dealing with this?" Rebekah pleaded. Matt shook his head, his jaw set.

"Bekah, he knows exactly how to get to me," he whispered, his hands fisted into the sheets, trying and failing to hide their trembling. "I can't hold out. If there's even a slim chance we can take care of this quickly, it doesn't matter; I have to take it."

"Brace yourself," Klaus instructed coolly, and then with no other warning, sank his toxic hybrid teeth into the quarterback's neck.

-0-

They found Stefan (predictably, in Caroline's opinion) up a tall tree, surveying the scene below him from a birds' eye view. He tended to do that when things went sideways; get above it all, sit on Elena's rooftop or go out on his balcony, so that he could see without being seen—plus it usually got him away from the smell of blood where applicable.

When he saw them, however, he leaned back, swinging from the branch on his knees and then letting go to land dexterously on his feet directly in front of her.

"Wow!" Jesse exclaimed. "Well if you're drunk, buddy, you're some kind'a drunk ninja." Caroline didn't flinch at Stefan's very public display of vampire reflexes, but she did turn to Jesse and ask him to give them a couple of minutes alone.

"Yeah," Stefan agreed, "that's probably a good idea, because I can sense from here that you have a paper cut on the palm of your left hand, and I want to rip your entire arm off." Caroline's jaw twitched. So much for politely extricating her tutor from the situation without him noticing anything.

"Go away, hide," she commanded, pupils expanding as her compulsion activated. "I'll find you," she added as he stumbled back a step, then turned to jog off and look for somewhere to hide.

"Caroline Forbes," he addressed her, raising the bottle he'd been gripping in his right hand. "My best friend."

"You recognize me?" she asked quietly, hope welling up in her that this whole thing might be on its way towards being solved already.

"I've studied pictures," he corrected, taking a drink. "You're much hotter in person."

"Well," she laughed bitterly as her hope curdled into disappointment, "I guess my lie about you being drunk off your ass wasn't a lie."

"Nope," he responded, popping the "p." "Sorry," he added after a moment. She waved him off.

"Are you okay?" she checked, stepping tentatively closer.

"Well, if by 'okay' you mean heavily spiraling into Ripper oblivion," he qualified sarcastically, taking another swig, "then yes, I'm dandy."

Caroline nodded. She'd been expecting that. Stefan, like most vampires, had always been a mess of desire—desire for blood, desire for Elena, desire for revenge—but unlike most vampires, his desire to be good and to be loved would usually overpower the rest. Right now, however, he had no memories, no understanding of what desire ought to be the most important, so he was reaching out, trying everything, wanting everything. As Elena had tearfully explained over the phone, his desire for her had backfired pretty badly, leaving him with his desire to feed at the forefront of his mind.

"Look," she started, holding up her hands placatingly. He knew he was a ripper, and he'd had the good sense to elevate himself and not attack anyone yet—she hoped that she'd be able to get through to him with reason. "I know that you're hungry, but you don't do people, okay? It just—it doesn't end well."

"What about blood bags?" he suggested immediately, and she was nodding before he'd even finished. "Do you have any blood bags?

"Yes," she assured him, relieved. "In the car. Come with me."

She felt him speed away behind her back the moment she turned.

"Damn it, Stefan!" she hissed, and sped after him.

It took seven minutes for her to find him, tracking the scent of strong liquor through the general miasma of beer and the occasional bottle of wine. Seven minutes too long, it turned out; she found him with his teeth embedded in Jesse's throat.

"Hey!" she exclaimed, pulling the two men apart. "Stefan, stop!" she snapped as the lowered Jesse to the floor and bit into her wrist, pressing it to his mouth without ever breaking eye-contact with her amnesiac best friend.

"This isn't you, okay?" she continued as Jessie choked down enough of her blood to seal up the gashed on his throat. "You might not remember, but I do. You are better than this. You are not this person."

"I have to go," Stefan muttered, his eyes widening as he took in the scene before him, his habitual remorse kicking in. "I have to leave."

"No, Stefan," Caroline raised up a hand to forestall him. "Stay put—" but he'd already vanished.

"Damn it," she sighed, turning back to Jesse. "I'm sorry I got you into this—so, so sorry."

"Got me into what?" Jesse all but squeaked as he sat up shakily. "What—what just happened to me?"

Caroline sighed, her heart sinking. Just that afternoon, she'd felt so powerful, so removed from human trivialities. And here was the result—this was what human trivialities looked like when they encountered the powerful. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathing through her nose.

Then she opened them up, compelled Jesse to believe he'd gotten blackout drunk in the middle of the day, and to take the next train back to Whitmore because he was too embarrassed to be around her for a bit, and then stood up and headed out to find her best friend.

And probably kick his ass.

-0-

This time, Stefan was on the roof of the police station—an irony if Caroline had ever seen one. She didn't try to hide her approach. Sneaking up on him when he had the high ground simply wasn't going to work. Instead, she climbed calmly up the fire escape, and sat down beside him, eyes surveying the town while she surreptitiously took him in from her peripheral vision. He'd been crying—there were tear tracks down his face, and his eyes still burned black.

"I should just turn myself in," he whimpered hollowly. "Hand myself over to the hunters in police uniforms—let them kill me." So, he was still in the obsessive guilt phase then. Except this version of Stefan had nothing left—nothing to lean on, to keep him strong when he crumbled like this.

Nothing but her, she supposed.

"If you do that," Caroline reasoned quietly, "they will never believe you were the only one. They will go after the people close to you—Damon, Elena, me, even Bonnie and Jeremy and Matt." She felt him flinch hard, and put an arm around him soothingly.

"Jesse is going to be just fine," she assured him. "I healed him, compelled him to forget, and sent him home."

"Caroline Forbes saves another poor soul from oblivion," he laughed humorlessly, and she wondered just what stories Damon and Elena had told about her.

"Yep," she agreed calmly, giving him a squeeze as she turned to watch the sun dip below the trees. "And now it's your turn."

He looked back at her, heartbroken, his eyes wide like a child contemplating a life raft in a storm.

"What are best friends for, anyway?" she added, pulling him closer so that as he began to sob again, he could bury his face in her shoulder. Perhaps it was a healthy thing that this version of Stefan was so much more honest about what he was thinking and feeling.

-0-

"Okay," Klaus decided as Matt's stuttering heartbeat started to fade, "that's about as far as we can safely go." Biting open his wrist, he bled profusely into a cup, which Rebekah took from him and carefully fed to Matt, who drank it greedily—like it was the cure to deadly, torturous poison. Klaus had bitten him six times, trying to get as much venom into him at once as he could, and the resulting seizures and fevered hallucinations had lasted about eight hours before he reached the edge of death. The whole time, as Matt thrashed and raved and gripped Rebekah's hand for dear life, Klaus had been reminded of his own experiences with having his mind invaded.

They weren't pleasant memories.

Once Matt could stand again, he stumbled into the bathroom for a much needed shower, while Rebekah ran out to replenish their blood supply.

"We can try again in the morning," she insisted once she'd returned and Klaus had approached Matt a second time.

"We can try again now," Matt insisted. "I think it's working—I can still see him, but I can sort of see the difference, like really old blue-screen stuff in movies. Let's get this over with." He held out his arm, and Klaus couldn't help but be a tiny bit impressed with his bravery; he wasn't even shaking, even though he knew what was coming now, knew exactly what he'd endure.

-0-

"And the _only_ person you were with from Whitmore was Caroline Forbes?" Dr. Maxfield checked, eyes flicking back and forth as he checked Jesse's readings.

"Yes, Doc," Jesse sighed, folding his hands behind his head as he lay on a gurney covered in wires. "The only Whitmore student I was with yesterday was Caroline. Why is that so important?" He'd only asked the Doc to take a look at him because he wanted to make sure he didn't have alcohol poisoning, and there was some blood on his collar that he couldn't account for.

"Your vitals are normal," Maxfield grumbled, rubbing his head tiredly.

"Don't sound so disappointed," Jesse chuckled.

"Tell me about your night," the professor demanded immediately, turning and leaning against his desk to look back at his TA.

Jesse shrugged helplessly. "Caroline Forbes took me to a party in Mystic Falls," he repeated for the third time. "Then...it's kind of a big blank. I must have been really drunk," he added thoughtfully.

"What's causing your memory loss didn't come in a red cup," Maxfield murmured, shaking his head and approaching the table. "It appears you have vampire blood in your system, Jesse, which means you were either injured to the point of needing to be healed, or someone wants to turn you into a vampire. I'm guessing the former, and then I'm guessing you were compelled to forget." The way he said it was just so calm, like a regular M.D. telling someone that they had the flu.

"What?" was Jesse's eloquent response.

"It's nothing to worry about," the Doc assured him, reaching behind him for a bottle and a needle, and loading it up. "The good news about having vampire blood in your system is that's step one to creating a new vampire." He continued to explain as he pushed out the bit of air, letting a little squirt of liquid spill over the top.

"This is step two."

The needle pinched slightly as it entered his neck—his mind too busy trying to comprehend all the vampire shit he just heard from someone he respected as a scientist to pay any attention to the sudden injection.

But then his heart sped up like he was running a marathon, pain blossoming through his chest. The frantic beeping of the monitor sent him into a panic as his muscles seized, and then his vision went black like the closing of a shade.

Wes Maxfield stood alone in his lab, looking down at the corpse he'd just made as the heart monitor flat lined behind him. Without turning, he reached behind him and deftly switched it off.

This was going to be fascinating.

-0-

Caroline sat one her side of their bed, still wearing her funeral dress, knees curled up to her chest as she listened to the sounds of Alphonse cooking her breakfast. With what little emotional energy she had left, she'd been pleasantly surprised to learn that he'd known of her arrival in town and intention of staying the night, after…

She hadn't slept a wink—hadn't even bothered to change out of her dress. She'd curled up on the bed for a while, laid her face on Klaus's pillow and wallowed in misery all night as it hit her over and over that while she'd been (for the most part) having the summer of her life, Bonnie had been _dead_ , and she hadn't even noticed.

She'd kept it together through receiving the news, because there had been Elena to comfort, and she'd managed through the memorial, because she had Stefan to take care of. But once everyone had gone home for the night—with Stefan promising to call her at regular intervals to prevent him from slaughtering the neighbors—she'd had nothing left to support her. She'd mechanically chewed dinner, drank a glass of B+ and three glasses of wine, then laid in bed and suffered until the sun came up and glinted off of her daylight ring, reminding her of the one that Bonnie had crafted for her, albeit grudgingly.

The thought almost made her laugh, but then all it did was enlarge the lump in her throat—she would so much rather have had the Bonnie who hated her very existence than have no Bonnie at all.

Sighing, she unplugged her phone and selected Klaus's number. It would be evening where he was, she reflected as she listened to the line ring twice, and then nearly burst into tears again at the sound of his voice.

"Hello, Sweetheart," he greeted her warmly, but there was a raggedness to his voice that suggested as little sleep as she'd gotten.

"Hi," she whispered back, trying to keep her voice steady.

"What's the matter?" he demanded immediately, hearing the trouble in her tone unerringly as always. "What's happened?"

"I, um," she whimpered, and then it all started to pour out. She told him about Bonnie, about Stefan, about the way she'd felt sitting in the forest when it occurred to her how far removed she was becoming from humanity as a whole.

"I don't know what I'm doing anymore," she breathed, wiping her eyes. "I just don't."

' _I don't know what I'm_ becoming _.'_

-0-

"Do I have to do everything myself?" Quetsiya hissed as Alexander's translucent ghost tried and failed to satisfactorily explain why he hadn't stuck to the plan.

"They overpowered me," he growled. "Just bring me back again, let me try again!" The ancient witch laughed humorlessly.

"So you can lead them nearly right to me again?" she demanded. "Thanks to you, instead of having the cure, I have the wrong Originals sniffing around. You were supposed to dagger Rebekah, use her as leverage to get Elijah, use him as leverage to manipulate Katherine—why the hell was she still conscious?"

"I wanted her to suffer," Alexander snarled, "like I suffered! I wanted—" but Quetsiya didn't care what he'd wanted; she waved a hand, banishing him back to the other side of the veil so she wouldn't have to listen to his pathetic justifications.

At least one part of her plan had worked, of course; she'd been able to have Stefan retrieved thanks to the dreams she'd planted in the Petrova doppelgangers' minds, and she'd used him, in turn, to fry Silas's mind control abilities. But really, she mused. If she wanted something done right, she really would have to do it herself…

-0-

"How about that way?" Rebekah asked, pointing down the street from their vantage point at the window.

"I see more people," Matt described, his voice a little raw from days of screaming and groaning, but still strong enough to speak thanks to his vampire healing. "I see rooftops, same color as the ones in that direction, and I see a stream, with a footbridge. There's a vendor with a cart crossing it.

"All 100% real," Rebekah sighed in relief. "But if you see anything else—"

"Tell you immediately," Matt repeated, "Yeah, I got it." He leaned down and kissed her, which she returned enthusiastically. In the background, Klaus was passed out cold on one of the beds, where he'd practically fallen once Pradeepta had left, after coming over to confirm that she could no longer sense anything untoward in Matt's head.

It had taken three doses, and nearly three days of constant pain, but everyone's favorite footballer was back in the game. Later, Matt would wonder what it was that made Klaus stick around for the whole ordeal, but for that moment, he was just glad that he could see clearly again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let’s talk magic technicalities! Remember when I said in the last chapter that there was more detail? Here it is, for those of you going, “what’s werewolf venom got to do with the Hunter’s Curse anyhow?”
> 
> Okay, so what’s about to follow is my headcanon about witches vs travelers. They’re both humans with a natural ability to do magic, but their magic types are vastly different, to the point where they can’t even exist in the same space without major conflict. 
> 
> My theory is that witches are orderly types of magic (everything has to have balance, if you don’t have enough power you have to channel someone else, everything is finite, everything has rules, and if you break them there are consequences.)  
> Meanwhile, Travelers are wild magic (hopping into other folks’ bodies because reasons, creating the immortality spell, not just in the privacy of their own home but out in the open, for everyone to admire, for a public event, because why not?)
> 
> So, in my little Beth Nottingham headcanon, some other types of magic we see in the show fall under one or the other of these categories. For example, they specifically needed Expression (a wild magic if I ever saw one) to open Silas’s tomb, which would have been sealed with traveler magic. Hypothesis? Two different sects of the same type of magic.
> 
> The werewolf curse strikes me as wild (or traveler) magic, because it’s a lot of raw, untamed power, nobody can really control them, and their venom causes their victims to go bananas before they die. Kind of like how the Hunter’s Curse (Quetsiya’s traveler magic) causes the victim to also go bananas and off themselves. Similarly, Silas’s mind-control ability doesn’t seem nearly as simple as compulsion; there’s a much greater element of deception, and people have more chances to resist, and that’s after he spend 2000 years honing his skills to the most exact science that he could. 
> 
> Also werewolves have been around for way longer than vampires (yeah, yeah, origin story in the Originals, I know, I’m ignoring that shit because I Did Not Vibe With It) so it makes sense that their creation was a very ancient form of magic. Traveler magic is super-duper old, as it thrived in ancient Greece so it likely cropped up way before that.
> 
> The vampire spell strikes me as orderly (or spirit) magic, because it’s extremely finite. Their strengths correspond to weaknesses and the objects channeled to create them, they can master both their abilities and urges with the proper training, and when a vampire enters someone’s mind, whether through dreams or through compulsion, it’s always completely under control.
> 
> So, regarding this story, werewolf venom, Silas and the Hunter’s curse all came about by traveler magic, and all attack the same part of the brain. This is why Caroline is immune to Silas but not to compulsion or people traipsing through her dreams, because compulsion is spirit magic and goes after a different part of the brain.
> 
> Additionally, this explains why Esther freaked the hell out and sealed Klaus’s werewolf side. It didn’t make any damn sense to me why she would prevent him from turning once the wolf was already out of the proverbial bag about his birth father—it would have made more sense to kick him out of the house or something if she wanted to show rejection of him and support for Mikael. However, if Klaus was suddenly using two contradictory types of magic simultaneously, one of which would have been blasphemy/black magic/taboo for Esther’s people, it would make perfect sense that her first response would be to seal it up. 
> 
> Plus, Esther figured out daylight rings in about two seconds once she realized her magical maniacs were burning alive, and yet the moonlight rings discussed in The Originals weren’t distributed to the point where her pre-teen wouldn’t die in a horrible accident? And no other witch figured out a way to stop their four-footed friends breaking every bone in their bodies once a month? In centuries? So, yeah, per Beth Nottingham, spirit magic and wild magic aren’t good bedfellows, which accounts for a great many plot discrepancies.


	6. What's Mine is Yours

The day of Caroline's nineteenth birthday brought with it the first layer of frost for the year, to Caroline's great disgust. In previous years, the cold snap had held off until later in October or early November, allowing for outdoor escapades, or at least lighter outerwear on her special day. She drank her morning blood bag slowly while Elena took the first shower, then washed up herself, pretending not to hear her roommate hanging paper decorations and blowing up balloons.

After acting properly surprised by the suddenly festive dorm room, and opening Elena's present (a Smartwatch that she'd been ogling online) with much more genuine surprise and delight, she headed out to her morning class. She had to duck out early, because Bonnie had dictated a happy birthday email to Jeremy and she knew at the first sentence that she was going to burst into tears, but it was touching, and she was grateful for the supernatural abnormalities that allowed them to communicate through the veil of death. Stefan texted her a happy birthday as well, and although she knew he'd done it because Damon and Elena had coached him to, it still meant something.

Klaus hadn't contacted her all day.

At first, she wasn't terribly concerned, thinking that he, the ultimate rich guy, had probably had a present shipped to her and was waiting to call her until her got delivery confirmation; very drama queen of him, to want control of the details all the way from Europe. As the day wore on, she thought maybe something serious had come up. Klaus, after all, was not the sort of boyfriend to forget her birthday, especially with it being the anniversary of their first conversation. Perhaps something was going fantastically right, and he'd found the very last of Silas's or Qetsiyah's (or whoever else's, at this point) informants, and he was going to call her that night and say that he'd be on the first plane home.

By the end of her last class, she'd begun to wonder if something dreadful had happened, and he hadn't called because he couldn't; because someone had injected him with enough wolfsbane to keep even him down and he was in great peril. She tried to focus on Elena's suggestions about where to go for dinner, but kept catching herself gnawing on her lip.

Finally, around four, she got a call from him, but did nothing to ease her nerves.

"Sweetheart, I'm so sorry to do this to you on your birthday," he greeted her, static and street noise rushing through the speakers and making it hard to make out what he was saying. "I need a favor from you. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't terribly important, but I need you to run an errand for me tonight. I can't say more here, but you'll know what to do when you get there."

"Text me the address," she responded hurriedly, imagining all sorts of horrible possibilities about how much trouble he could be in.

"Thank you, love," he responded, and then disconnected.

"Sorry Elena, we'll have to do birthday dinner tomorrow," she explained, but Elena had of course heard the conversation and just nodded.

"Text me when you have more information so I know you're safe," she requested as Caroline's phone buzzed with the address.

-0-

The house was pretty, Caroline thought as she pulled into the unfamiliar driveway. With a combination of rough stone façade and dark brown wood-grain siding, huge windows revealing tastefully decorated rooms, and the faint sound and smell of a pool out back, it was comfortably upper-middle-class.

Shifting her car into park and pulling the keys from the ignition, Caroline checked her phone one more time against the black numbers displayed near the door, just to make sure that she'd found the right place before ringing the doorbell. The property was only a few minutes' walk from the school, but since she didn't know what would be needed of her, she'd driven so she'd have her car at hand if she should need it.

Sure enough, the numbers matched up with Klaus's text, and she stepped out of the car, dropping her phone into her purse and wondering whose house he'd sent her to, and why. Soft instrumental music was playing from within, just enough to make it hard for her to discern anything specific about her host's breathing or heartbeat. She headed up the artfully paved walkway, but before she could get as far as the porch, she saw out of the corner of her eye a woman leaving the neighboring house and striding across the lawn directly towards her.

"Caroline Forbes?" she asked once she was within a few yards.

"That's me," Caroline responded brightly, then glanced back at the house number. "Was I supposed to…?" she checked, pointing to her car and then to the neighbor's driveway, wondering if somehow Klaus and Google Maps had both led her astray. But the stranger shook her head.

"Oh, no honey, I'm just here to say, welcome, go on in, and make yourself at home."

"I see," Caroline responded with a nod. "Thank you very much." With a friendly wave, the neighbor turned and headed back towards her own house. Caroline just barely caught the moment when her eyes went blank, compulsion most likely erasing the last few moments—and possibly the fact that she owned the house next door—from her mind.

Knowing that whoever she'd been sent to meet was almost certainly a vampire and therefore knew she was coming, she didn't bother to knock, entering through the unlocked door and closing it behind her.

"Hello," she called softly, wondering if she should take her jacket off. If Klaus was bothering with cryptic phone calls, then it was important, but did "important" mean staying for a while, or leaving quickly for some death-defying act of heroism?

"Hello sweetheart," Klaus greeted her warmly from the upstairs hallway. Her face broke out into a huge smile and she dropped her purse onto the floor, running up the stairs to fling herself into his arms.

"When did you get back?" she demanded, then kissed him before he could reply. She could feel him chuckling, and pressed closer to him, not having realized just how intensely she'd missed him until relief washed over her in waves.

"Couple of hours ago," he responded when they broke away. "Wasn't about to miss your birthday, love."

"How long do we have?" she asked after kissing him again.

"How long do you want me?" he countered with a grin.

"All of eternity," she responded, "but I'm guessing you still have witches to deal with, so I'll settle for a three-day weekend."

"We've nearly got to their leader," he promised her, pulling away slightly. "This will be over with shortly. But for now, I think your three-day-birthday-weekend ought to start with a birthday dinner—what do you recon?"

"I _recon_ ," she responded with a smirk as she imitated his vernacular, "that it's funny you think I'm going to wait that long." Her hands were fisted in his shirt as she drew him back towards her.

"Well, never let it be said that I don't have a plan B," Klaus laughed as he hooked his hands under her thighs to pick her up, then sped them onto a surface that could have been a bed or a sofa or a lounge or a really dense cloud for all Caroline noticed—or cared.

-0-

Later, they sat across from each other eating sushi out of elaborately carved dishes—at one of five different restaurants at which Klaus, king of the plans B, C, D and beyond, had placed reservations with staggered times. Caroline had changed from her ready-for-anything jeans and boots into a sleeveless green dress and black heels that Klaus had produced apparently from thin air.

"So whose house was that?" Caroline asked, dropping her voice conspiratorially as she tried to make a mental tally of how many rooms they'd…christened.

"Ours," Klaus responded cheerfully, before popping an eel roll into his mouth. "I'm sure visiting you on campus will be amusing, but I can't imagine the various staff—or your roommate—will be particularly keen on me in your dorm at all hours of the night."

"Yeah, I can't see that going over well," Caroline laughed, taking a sip of her sangria. "Hey," she added thoughtfully, "can I keep my car in the garage then? Parking on campus is a nightmare."

"Our house, sweetheart," he repeated slowly, raising his eyebrows. "You can buy a pony and keep it there if you like. Well, I suppose we'd have to alter the back garden a bit to admit for a stable… knock out the fence at the back and buy up more property for pasture…"

"Okay, I get it," she laughed, rolling her eyes. "You're richer than Midas, and what's yours is mine and all of that."

"Precisely," he responded. "But seriously, if you want horses, that can easily be arranged."

"Klaus, I have the distinct impression that if I wanted a tiger I'd find one in my dorm room with a blue bow around its neck and an ironclad registration as an emotional support animal."

"As a matter of fact," Klaus replied without missing a beat, "there is a temple in Thailand where they've managed to domesticate some wonderfully friendly tigers—totally safe to have on campus, as they've been fed cooked meat and cat food all their lives and never developed a taste for blood."

"Really?" Caroline asked with a fascinated smile, eyes narrowing as she tried to imagine that.

"Really," he assured her. "Keep it in mind when you're thinking of where you want to spend winter break."

"Do you think your international business will be concluded by then?" she asked quietly, glancing around to make sure no one was listening, even though she hadn't said anything about witches out loud.

"I'm confident of it," he responded. "As we speak, Rebekah is getting a few last crucial bits of information out of one of our… contacts. Once that's done with, we'll have them by the throat." Caroline wrinkled her nose.

"Is Matt still over there?" she asked, wondering how her remarkably innocent friend was handling his girlfriend torturing someone. It wasn't like he didn't know she did such things, but Caroline had the sneaking suspicion it was different in person. She wondered what it would be like, the first time she saw Klaus torturing someone… Would it frighten her? Could anything about him frighten her anymore?

"He's been remarkably dedicated to the cause after his ordeal at the hands of Alexander's ghost," Klaus answered, sensing the intent behind her question. "And… he is like us now," he reminded her.

"Yeah," she responded. "I guess I just always thought he'd be more like Elena and Stefan, you know," she shrugged. When Klaus wasn't there and the only vampires she spent time with were her roommate and the Salvatores, it was difficult to remember that it was they, the self-loathing vampires, who were the minority. While she considered herself to have a significantly higher moral standard than Damon, she was more and more comfortable in her own skin, seeing herself as a vampire, rather than a human afflicted with vampirism.

"The comparison is there," Klaus agreed evenly, setting down his chopsticks across his empty dish and picking up his glass. "I imagine having Rebekah making every effort to help him make the change has had some effect. It's had quite the effect on her as well," he admitted. Caroline frowned slightly, interested.

"My sister is much like your friends—she never quite lost the desire to be human," he explained. "But when she has the chance to revel in what she is, and teach someone else to revel in what we are—that is when she is the most at ease. Matt becoming a vampire has been the best possible antidote to her disappointment over losing the cure."

Caroline nodded thoughtfully, finishing off her drink and setting down her glass.

"And there aren't any after effects? From the Hunter's Curse?" she checked.

"Nothing left but a bad memory and some broken furniture in a hotel in Nepal," he assured her. "Speaking of hunters," he added, "any progress with Doctor Maxfield?"

"Nothing on him yet, although I might have an in with his T.A." she added with a noncommittal head gesture. If Jesse could stop flirting with her long enough to tell her anything important, that would be great, she thought sourly. "I'm running an A- in the class, to general surprise, but so far I haven't had much opportunity to investigate Doctor Shady himself."

"And you're sure you wouldn't rather remove his internal organs alphabetically first, ask questions later? Or during?" Klaus checked, his tone joking, but they both knew he was quite serious. She stepped on his foot under the table, expression sour, and he snickered at her reaction.

"Look," he added more seriously, "I just mean you have a lot on your plate right now between Bonnie and Stefan-no one would fault you for trimming down your responsibilities."

"I think my roommate might just fault me for murdering our biology teacher," she added, voice determinedly casual in case of eavesdroppers as she took another drink.

"Tell her he got religion and moved to Utah," Klaus responded with a wave of his hand, at exactly the right time to make Caroline's drink go up her nose. She tried to glare at him while laughing, but the effect was lost.

"I'm thinking I just need access to his computer," she added once she'd gotten ahold of herself and wiped her face. "It's difficult to predict when no one will be in his office, since he shares lab space with two other science professors, and the offices themselves open from that space. The only class period where there's usually no one there is the one where I'm in class with him, and if he notices there's been a break in, I don't want to be the only test-taking student without an alibi. At night once they leave there's an alarm system that trips when any door opens, ruling out a nighttime excapade and the idea of hiding in a different office until he leaves and being inside when it's set, unless I want to spend the night there and risk being caught in the morning…"

"Have you considered compelling someone to go in on your behalf-one of the other professors, perhaps?"

"If I can guarantee they aren't on vervain, I'd consider it," she sighed, "but all things considered I have to assume the whole department is complicit. Honestly," she lowered her voice, "I've been thinking that nabbing Maxfield and bleeding him out might be my best bet, if I can do it without Elena noticing."

"Well for the record, I am always more than willing to help with the violent bits," Klaus responded with a mock-toast.

"I have never doubted that for a second," Caroline responded with a smirk, raising her own glass as well, and trying very, very hard not to think of what Bonnie was probably thinking if she was watching them.

-0-

"Not bad, for your first time," Rebekah commented approvingly, leaning against the bathroom doorway as Matt washed blood off his hands. Matt shrugged noncommittally, still not sure how he felt about the whole torturing-people thing.

"Who do you suppose that Nadia person is?" he asked, shutting off the water and reaching for a towel. The man they'd just killed had been tasked by Qetsiyah to follow someone named Nadia; a known accomplice of Silas.

"Well she's madder than a hatter, whomever she is," Rebekah commented. "Who allies themself with Silas on purpose? He's trying to cause the bloody apocalypse, for heaven's sake."

"Makes a guy wonder if we shouldn't be trying to talk to Qetsiyah, instead of hacking our way through her followers," Matt muttered with a shrug. "Enemy of my enemy-"

"-Sent a cursed, undead hunter to torment you into an early grave, and is therefore not on the list of potential allies," Rebekah cut him off sharply, putting a hand on his shoulder to gently turn him to face her.

"I get that eternal patience and forgiveness is sort of your thing," she added more softly, pressing her palm to his face, "but part of running with the Originals is that we look after our own; and we do not forgive slights against them." Matt nodded, then leaned down to kiss her briefly.

"Guess we gotta find this Nadia character now," he said.

-0-

Halfway around the world, Nadia Petrova's ears burned, and she scratched them irritably as she waited for her food to arrive, senses trained on the well-dressed couple on the other side of the restaurant, heart pounding at being so close to her goal.

-0-

"Do you think they'd appreciate truffles? Or is that too complex?"

To the casual observer, it would appear that the ordinary—if unusually attractive—couple in the candy aisle were purchasing specialty sweets for a semi-sophisticated Halloween party, with the holiday itself coming up and all. However, what said casual observer wouldn't have realized was that the blonde woman intended to purchase a hundred pieces of whatever she chose, and give them out to all the little ghosts and ghouls who rang her doorbell.

"I honestly don't remember what I liked as a child, so this is all on you, sweetheart," Klaus laughed from behind her, snagging a box of his favorite mint chocolates and depositing them in the basket on his arm. Rarely did he do his own shopping, but he'd been trying to keep Caroline busy that weekend so she could keep her mind off of the latest dose of grief the horrendously unfair universe had decided to dump on her. That morning she'd expressed a desire to shop, but hadn't been able to come up with a single thing she was lacking, between her already massive mall habit and her wealthy, gift-giving boyfriend and his well-furnished houses.

"Well, Halloween is coming up," he shrugged, just throwing suggestions out there after she'd vetoed aimlessly wandering through the mall without a single item in mind that she wanted to purchase. "Do you need anything for that? I'm quite partial to dressing you up," he added, pressing a kiss to her shoulder.

She snorted, remembering just how true that was, before exclaiming, "candy!"

"Do you give out candy normally?" she asked, turning to face him. His eyebrows snapped up his forehead as he gestured to himself incredulously. She stuck her tongue out, then pressed a peck to his lips before getting up off the couch they'd been lounging on and slipping her feet into her shoes. "Well, guess what we're doing this year," she said smugly, offering him a hand, which he took, and stood up.

"Suppose this is what I get for buying another house," he muttered.

"This is what you get for being a vampire-werewolf-hybrid!" she exclaimed. "How do YOU not celebrate Halloween?" Again, he gestured at himself, raising his eyebrows, but had kept her hand and walked with her out to the car, then drove them to the nearest store that sold individually packaged confections.

"I think kid-me wouldn't have liked strawberry cheesecake truffles," Caroline responded, putting the box back with a pout. "She was more of a Reese's Cups kind of girl." As she turned to look for cheaper, more kid-friendly labels, Klaus removed the box she'd just abandoned and set it in the basket beside his own.

"Well, adult you clearly likes them," he responded with a shrug to her questioning look. "You didn't specify that we weren't also shopping for ourselves." Her little smile had dimples this time as she drew him into the next aisle. This one was lined with large economy bags of familiar Mars products, and several families with small children were selecting their own ghoulish goodies. Caroline's eyes strayed from the package she was examining to look at two little boys running circles around their dad's legs.

"Have you ever wanted kids?" she asked quietly before she'd really thought it through. She bit her tongue, already formulating an apology. As a rule of thumb, that was a question you never asked a vampire. But Klaus responded, unoffended, before she could speak again.

"Wanted, no, not really," he said slowly. "Well, when I was human, I suppose I wanted the same things everyone wanted—a home, a family of my own, work that I could be proud of—but it was always eclipsed by my wholehearted and single-minded desire to move out of my parents' house and as far away from Mikael as I could manage. That colored the way I saw things back then, so now, I'm not sure what I wanted. I suppose if I was actually confronted with one, that would have frightened me—lack of positive male role models and all," he added, with an incline of his head and a resigned roll of his eyes.

"I sort of had one once, though," he admitted, his eyes also straying to the little boys, whose father was now pretending to shoot at them with a toy gun as they dramatically dodged in every direction. Caroline's head whipped around to look at him, wide-eyed.

"Marcellus*," he added after a long silence. "Bastard son of the governor of Louisiana and one of his house slaves. This was back in 1820, pre-emancipation and civil war," he added at Caroline's visible confusion. "We were attending the funeral of some unimportant fellow—I probably killed him, don't remember for certain, but what I do remember was an overseer beating a little slave boy, and the slave boy hurling apples at his tormenter, afraid, but unbowed," he added, his eyes getting a faraway look in them. "I killed the overseer, and took in the boy. Due to superstition, his mother hadn't named him when he was born, and then she died before she got the chance, so I gave him the name 'Marcellus,' meaning 'little warrior.' It seemed to fit him." He smiled fondly, then crooked an eyebrow at Caroline's wondering expression. "What?"

"I just… I had never really imagined it before," she said smiling, her nose crinkling a little. "You with a kid. How'd that go?" Klaus shrugged.

"Middling, I suppose," he responded modestly, but his little fond smile suggested he'd enjoyed every moment of it, despite whatever difficulties had downgraded the experience to "middling" in his estimation. "Half the decisions I made wound up being fights between me and Elijah about child-rearing practices and educational priorities," he elaborated. "On the upside, Marcel certainly gained the ability to navigate complex relationships throughout his childhood," he added, gesturing with his pointer finger. Caroline snorted in agreement.

"Understatement of the century, I'm guessing," she laughed, tossing two big candy bags into the basket and taking his arm to walk into the next aisle. "So what did he grow up to be?" she asked, wondering what sort of influence it would have on a child, to grow up with vampires as your parents, your teachers, your protectors. How often could that even happen?

"A skilled warrior, powerful orator, and, at his insistence at the age of 25, a vampire," Klaus responded. "There was the obligatory doomed love-affair between him and my sister for a while, and in the early nineteen-teens he became engaged to this New Orleans witch. She was widowed before her marriage," he murmured darkly. Caroline inhaled sharply, eyes full of compassion.

"Mikael killed him when he came looking for us," the Hybrid growled after collecting himself for a moment.

"I'm so sorry," Caroline murmured, leaning into him a little further.

"He was one in a long, long list of casualties to that feud," Klaus responded. "That's why I erased all of Stefan's memories of our time together in the twenties," he added, "so he wouldn't do something stupid to try to help us escape and get himself killed."

As they made their way out of the candy aisle, Caroline reflected that there was a reason why there were so few people in Klaus's life that he cared for enough to protect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Marcellus (Marcel Gerard) is a main character in The Originals, and appeared in one episode of the Vampire Diaries, the Originals' backdoor pilot. If you don't watch TO, fear not, I've just told you everything you're going to need to know about him. If you do watch TO, and if you're among those wondering from season 1 when he was last mentioned if he'll turn out to really be alive, then I'm sorry to disappoint you, but in this universe, Klaus has all the facts. Marcel really is dead, and will not be making a cameo. (Hey, I love him too, but there's really no room for his plotline in this story. *Shrugs helplessly.*)


	7. All the Monsters Come to Dance

Katherine took a long, slow sip of her coffee, regarding the self-proclaimed Nadia Petrova over the rim of her mug. Of all the human experiences in which she had taken part over the years, the proverbial knock on the door was not one she’d expected after the first fifty years of vampirism. She’d given up hope of ever seeing her daughter again, particularly after she’d met Isobel and they’d compared family histories. According to her, Nadia had died in a flood after giving birth to her sons, one of whom had spawned Isobel’s family line. However, the “Nadia” sitting across from her and Elijah in the booth had a slightly different story to tell. 

“It makes one wonder, I suppose,” Elijah was observing to fill the silence, “how many snake oil salesmen were really vampires.”

“Who can say,” Nadia agreed as Katherine took another gulp. It was clear that both were waiting for her to make a pronouncement of some kind, but honestly she didn’t have the foggiest notion what to say. If this was true, then she didn’t want to risk screwing it up. If it was an elaborate lie forged to prey on what little humanity she had left, then she didn’t want to fall for it.

‘God, my life was so much easier when I didn’t care about anyone but myself,’ she groused internally.

-0-

“Now _this_ is more like it,” Caroline purred as she opened the huge beribboned box that a confused mailroom aide had delivered to her a moment ago. 

“You’re never going to let him live down pretending he forgot your birthday, are you?” Elena checked with a smirk as her fingers typed up a Comp I essay at vampire-speed.

“Nope,” Caroline responded brightly. She’d enjoyed the surprise visit, of course, but it didn’t hurt to occasionally remind her still-traveling and much older boyfriend that she required a _great deal of attention_. Klaus had returned to the US two days ago, but had been oddly quiet about when he next wanted to see her. The timely arrival of the Scarlett O’Hara style dress she was unpacking, coupled with the historical-themed dance scheduled for that evening, soothed her mounting fear that him keeping her waiting for the drama of it might become a habit.

“You invited Damon, I’m assuming?” she checked as she held the dress up to herself in the mirror, wondering if it was meant to be a costume or if it was one of Kol’s designs from that period. She’d have to ask Klaus when he showed up. 

“He’s already here,” the brunette replied quietly, her fingers slowing. “He left to pick up costumes.” Caroline glanced at her out of the corner of her eye, but didn’t comment. She could guess that Elena felt a terrible guilt about having the summer of love with Damon while Bonnie was dead and none of them had noticed. She thought she’d feel the same - if her grief over her mother hadn’t been so fresh a part of her relationship with Klaus already. It was a different dynamic.

“So is this like a college party, or like a _college party_?” she wondered aloud, trying to gently bring her friend back to a shallower and less painful plane of existence. “Will there be alcohol, or adults?”

“I guess both,” Elena responded. “I overheard Dr. Maxfield saying he was going to chaperone - but I also saw some students delivering alcohol to the building.

“I love being almost an adult,” Caroline snickered, laying her dress out and grabbing her schoolbag to get ready for class.

-0-

Stefan ran his tongue along his teeth, eyes following the costumed college students as their legs carried their delicious blood into the warm, poorly ventilated basement designated for the night’s festivities. 

“This is a great idea,” he grumbled sarcastically, taking a long swig of blood out of the insulated coffee thermos he’d taken to carrying everywhere. Caroline had thought that having a reminder that as much blood as he wanted was available right at his fingertips might be a better incentive not to go full ripper on the people around him than some story about a life and set of values he couldn’t remember. So far, she was right - the temptation was still there, but he could control it, taking sips every time he thought about being thirsty. By this time of day he was actually feeling a little bloated and liquidy, but that was a lot less uncomfortable than potentially losing what little of his mind he had left, so he’d take it.

“You’ll be fine,” his blonde sober sponsor assured him as she touched up her lipstick, using her phone as a mirror. “I’ll be there the whole time; just come and get me if things get bad. Great job on your James Dean hairstyle, by the way,” she added as they reached the door and she stuck phone and lipstick into her pockets.

Stefan’s eyebrows flexed a little in response to the comment while he tried to work out what he’d done differently than how he’d been styling his hair every day that he could remember. She’d said she picked him an easy costume - maybe that was what she meant instead of the simple list of which jacket and jeans to wear.

“So which one of these walking snacks is your thousand-year-old boyfriend?” he asked, surveying the room as they descended the stairs, and then heading towards the food and drink table.

“Fashionably late,” she responded delicately, “and remind me later to give you a crash course in the slang usage of the word ‘snack,’” she added, carefully suppressing a snort. Stefan’s eyebrows answered for him again, and he decided to drop the small talk and seek out some carbs to absorb all the blood in his stomach.

“Oh, hey Stefan,” Elena greeted him a bit awkwardly as she swept up to him, all plastic pearls and crushed velvet. “Can I talk to you a second? In private?” His eyebrows responded for a third time as he tossed a handful of chips in his mouth as he followed his hot but complicated ex into another room.

-0-

A familiar pair of arms wrapped around Caroline’s waist as she finished her first drink, and a familiar pair of lips pressed a kiss to the side of her neck.

“Twenty minutes late and now public displays of affection,” she giggled, setting the empty bottle down and trying and failing to sound mock-stern. “What are you trying to do to my reputation?”

“With enough courage, you can do without a reputation,” he quoted smugly, then kissed her properly. He’d gone all out, dressed perfectly as Rhett Butler - or perhaps just in his own clothes preserved from the era; she could never tell with him and historical costumes. “You look positively delicious,” he added, glancing her up and down appreciatively.

“I love the dress,” she grinned, stepping back and twirling. Klaus kept her hand, holding it up as she spun and then gently pulling her back into him. “Don’t rip it later,” she whispered into his ear, grazing the lobe with her teeth, and appreciating his answering shiver and growl, and the way his free hand settled firmly on her hip.

“No promises darling,” he whispered back. “Just how much later were you thinking?” She giggled as he took a few steps back, leading her onto the dance floor. 

“At least here your peer group is a tad closer to adulthood,” he commented after they’d slow danced for a few steps. In the background, Stefan had migrated to the bar, trading in his insulated cup for a glass of scotch. Doctor Maxfield gave him a long suffering look, then downed his own drink, and sought out Elena to make a dreadful history joke. 

“Hmm, tell that to the boys spray painting the empty science building as we spe—” Her voice died.

“What,” Klaus asked, and she felt the way he straightened up subtly, readying himself for a possible threat.

“Professor creepy is here,” she muttered into his shoulder, so quietly that if he hadn’t had vampire senses, he wouldn’t have heard a word. “Some members of the Lacrosse team who aren’t happy about the fact that their Chemistry grades are keeping them from competing are vandalizing it. They were really sure that it was going to be empty tonight.”

“I see…” he murmured, and then added in a seductive, human-volume whisper, “Want to get out of here?” Even though Caroline knew that he was saying it as a cover, the burning look she gave him was 1000% genuine - having a Significant Other who wanted to be her partner in crime instead of keeping her on the sidelines was incredibly hot. 

-0-

“Doesn’t exactly scream ‘evil lair,’” Caroline commented as she meandered slowly around one of the stone-topped tables, running her fingers over the tap of the built-in sink. “Looks like a bigger version of the lab in your house I guess. Messier though,” she added, wrinkling her nose as she glanced at the leaning stacks of papers on the next table over. Were they going to have to go through _all_ of that to find anything worthwhile? She’d imagined herself scrolling through a computer, looking up keywords, Klaus sitting behind her and whispering dirty things in her ear… 

“You do realize that anything in our house counts as an evil lair by default,” Klaus chuckled. He’d entered the room first, speeding around and covering all four of the cameras (two visible, two hidden) with masking tape in the two seconds it took Caroline to find and flip the light switch. 

“Fair,” she laughed as she started to open drawers one by one, “but only partially evil. You have to count me for something after all.”

“Far be it from me to count you out, love,” he responded, his eyes flicking up to her before flicking down again as he glanced into a cabinet. “There’s a safe in here,” he added conversationally as he knelt to take a better look at it. Caroline whirled to see what he’d found, but just then, she heard a familiar voice groan in pain from somewhere nearby.

“Jesse?” she called quietly, following the sound and finding a bookshelf.

“Who?” Klaus checked, frowning and not quite looking up at her as he concentrated on listening to the tumblers in the safe.

“Creepy professor’s TA,” Caroline explained absently as she examined the shelving unit, looking for a lever disguised as a book, or a button hidden in an ornate box, or…

“Love vampire senses,” she muttered as she noticed the layers of fingerprints on an extra smooth and shiny portion of the shelf. It lit up when she touched the largest deposit of skin oil - clearly the first number - and on her second try, she got the combination correct. The shelf unsealed from the wall, and she pulled open the hidden door.

“Oh my god,” she whispered, horrified, as she took in the scene.

Now _this_ was an evil lab. A small, windowless room, with computer screens built into the wall - and her friend chained to an operating table. The stench of old vampire blood and vervain in the air mixed with Jesse’s unwashed body and the tang of his fear and pain. There was a tag on his big toe like he was a corpse, with only a number printed on it - 62547.

“Backup harddrive,” Klaus announced quietly as he appeared behind her, the drive from the safe in his hand. “You didn’t mention other vampires on campus,” he added as Caroline ran forward, ripping at the restraints. “Here, these might help.” She raised her hand and caught the keys he’d tossed her without even looking up.

“He wasn’t a vampire the last time I saw him,” she explained in helpless confusion. “I thought he stopped returning my calls because he realized I wasn’t interested in him romantically - I never imagined he got kidnapped by a mad scientist…”

“Madder than you expected, I presume?” Klaus lifted Jesse’s limp torso up as Caroline unchained his feet.

“Understatement of the century,” she sighed, reaching out to take Jesse, but Klaus lifted him up, frowning and shaking his head. She didn’t argue - there was nothing wrong with letting him do the literal heavy lifting - but it felt weird. Since Jesse had vanished off the face of the earth shortly after she’d given him her blood, she suspected that he was her turn. That made him her responsibility, in a weird sort of way.

“My blood stash is full,” was all she said out loud, gesturing towards the door. “And we can go through the hard drive from my computer.”

-0-

“What’s happening?” Jesse’s muddled voice begged in the background as Caroline slowly scrolled through the contents of Wes’s backup drive. She’d just gotten to Megan’s real death record - apparently there was a vampire called Augustine who was responsible. “Where…?”

“Deep breaths mate,” Klaus said calmly from where he’d been perusing the dark web from his phone, cross-referencing some of what Caroline had found.

“Who the hell are you?” the young vampire’s voice broke twice, and he sobbed at the end, trying and failing to sit up.

“Take it easy,” Caroline instructed soothingly, flitting to sit on Megan’s bed where they’d laid him out, and handing him a blood bag. “We rescued you earlier this evening. Maxfield probably doesn’t even know you’re gone yet - Elena says he’s still at the party.” Jesse’s breathing slowed immediately as he deliberately worked to quell his rising panic. Then he looked down at the full plastic bag he was holding. 

“What’s—” he trailed off, shaking his head in confusion.

“It’s what you’re craving,” she responded simply. “Drink up - you’ll feel better, I promise.” Jesse blinked twice, slowly, and then raised the blood bag to his mouth, slipping the cap off one of the tubes and fitting it between his lips. He drank deeply, the veins in his face standing out, and the noises of desperate relief were probably exactly how Caroline had sounded that first night in the hospital - after she’d finished trying not to cry, of course.

“I’ve heard of these people somewhere I think,” Klaus commented, spinning around in Caroline’s desk chair to face them. “The name Augustine rings a bell, but I thought the whole operation burned down in the 80s - before I could get there to do it myself, to be honest. Humans messing about with magic for their own ends does not, historically, end well.” 

“Didn’t end so great for Megan,” Caroline agreed soberly. 

“Megan…” Jesse echoed, finishing off the bag and rolling it contemplatively between his fingers. “Aaron’s friend, right? Your roommate?”

“The one who died, yeah,” Caroline sighed. “But that doesn’t mean this has to end badly for you. Do you know what you are?”

“He said…” Jesse responded haltingly, shaking his head like he could shake off all the strangeness in it, “he said I was a vampire. But I can’t be, vampire’s aren’t real, they’re just a scary story… except…”

“Except when I took you to that event in my hometown,” Caroline prompted quietly, taking the empty bag, rolling it tightly, and sliding it into an empty tampon wrapper to camouflage it in the trash can.

“Your friend,” Jesse whispered. “He… he bit me. He fed on me. And you—you healed me. You made me forget…How, how did you make me forget all about that?”

“Mind compulsion,” she explained. “It breaks when you turn. I’ll explain everything. But first,” she stood up and began to pace, gnawing at her lip. “If Wes is willing to go as far as to abduct and hold prisoner his own TA, then he’s more dangerous than I assumed. And he’s not going to stay at that party forever.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Klaus promised, standing as well and pocketing his phone. “Do you want him dead, or do you want answers first?” He wrapped his hands around the top of her biceps, squeezing gently to ground her as her heart started to pound.

“Answers,” she breathed out of bloodless lips. When she’d wondered if she’d feel differently about Klaus if she got to see him torture somebody, she hadn’t expected to have the answer to that fall into her lap so soon. “It’s completely possible he didn’t record everything I need to know on his hard drive - and I’m mostly worried about how many accomplices he has on campus. There’s a few too many vampires trying to live here for me to be comfortable being neighbors with a mystery society.”

Klaus kissed her temple, and then vanished, whooshing out of the room at vampire speed. 

“How?!” Jesse exclaimed, gesturing wildly between the space Klaus had vacated, and the door as it slowly swung shut.

“Like I said,” Caroline assured him, “I’ll explain everything. But first, we need to go visit my friend Professor Terry before she goes to bed. You’re going to need a piece of jewelry before the sun comes up.”

Jesse stood obediently, still frowning, helplessly mouthing the word ‘jewelry?’ as he followed her out into the night.

-0-

“I don’t know what to think,” Katherine sighed as she leaned into Elijah’s shoulder. They’d moved the conversation back to the penthouse they’d been renting as it got late and it became clear that either Katherine or Nadia (or both) was going to become more emotional than they wanted to be in public. Nadia had detailed her centuries of searching for Katherine, and Katherine had admitted the way she’d scoured Bulgaria for her in 1498. Then Nadia had excused herself to use the ladies’ room. From the redness of her eyes, Katherine suspected it wasn’t only for the traditional purpose, and was politely focusing her senses on the room at hand.

“I think that if this is real, then it is a miracle,” Elijah offered. “And frankly, after all you have suffered in your life, you deserve a miracle.

“I want it to be real,” she admitted softly, carefully suppressing tears of her own. “My greatest regret in 500 years of life was always that none of the power I gained was enough to keep her with me.”

“Well, when she comes back, perhaps you should tell her—” Elijah paused, glancing to his left as he honed his hearing in the direction of the restroom.

Katherine heard the change in his heartbeat before she heard the emptiness of the rest of the penthouse, and the gently moving wind beyond the open window in their bedroom.

“Damn,” she growled, standing and marching into the room, eyes taking in the scene and each item, exactly where she’d left it, except… 

“No,” she gasped, falling to her knees in front of the box where she stored her favorite boots. It had been shifted by half a centimetre - a glaring difference to a vampire’s eyes. 

“Did she… make off with your Jimmy Choos?” Elijah asked, following her into the room and trying not to laugh.

“Nope,” Katherine choked out, holding the boots upside down by the heels and shaking them for emphasis. “Just what I was hiding inside them, disguised as a sachet.”

“The cure,” Elijah realized aloud.

‘God,’ Katherine thought for the second time that day, steadfastly forcing herself to ignore the familiar pain of betrayal, ‘my life was so much easier when I didn’t care about anyone but myself,’ 

-0-

“Well,” Silas commented, carefully breaking off the top of the vial and holding it up in toast to the vampire standing in front of him. “I’m damn glad there’s one person on this godforsaken planet who can do their part tonight. Cheers.”

“I hope you can see inside of my mind one last time,” Nadia warned in a quiet snarl, “that if you harm one hair on my mother’s head after this, I will take advantage of your brand new mortality in the most painful ways I can think of.”

“Relax, little Petrova,” Silas laughed. “Outside of the cure, I have no interest in a 500-year-old coward whose only real skill is getting the hell out of dodge. Frankly, I’ll be happy if I never have to see her tacky impersonation of my one true love ever again. Bottom’s up,” he added, and drained the vial in one gulp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I LIVE!!! Hi people, it's been a while. As you can see, that whole "but maybe my busy schedule will cause me to write more instead of preventing me from writing, wouldn't that be rad?" was wishful thinking. The good news is, I quit my second job - the bad news is, there's an entire pandemic happening and I'm supposed to be in school full time starting in a couple of weeks (and they still seem to think we're going to be in the building - that'll be interesting). 
> 
> Come scream with me on Tumblr - BethNottingham013, link in my profile!


	8. Twists and Turns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific TW: torture stuff

As the moon began to set and the sun began to rise on the morning of All Saints Day, they met in the sky for a moment, looking down on the earth below as they illuminated it between them.

The moon saw two magical beings - one young, immortal, tired, and desperate, one old, conniving, but hopeful and alive for the first time in millennia. Perhaps they could be of mutual use to each other after all - if only they could find the Anchor.

The sun saw a witch waking up in a stolen cabin, smirking at the vampire still passed out on the sofa that wasn’t hers as she flung open the windows to greet the dawn. Today was the day she’d have her revenge, and oh wasn’t it sweet. It would be another fifteen minutes before she noticed the boundary spell on the cabin.

They both noticed the blonde immortal walking up the driveway to the suburban house near her college, laptop and stolen hard drive in a bag slung over her shoulder. She paused at the threshold, took a deep breath to steady herself for what she’d find inside, and then walked resolutely in.

-0-

“Morning love,” Klaus greeted Caroline from upstairs, and she followed the sound of his voice to the kitchen. “Bacon?” he offered - quite unnecessarily as she’d already stolen one off the plate he was making for himself. 

“Sleep at all?” she asked as she fixed her own plate. She could hear Maxfield’s heartbeat from the basement - light and rapid, probably from bloodloss.

“A few hours,” he responded, turning off the heat under a pan of eggs and dividing them up. “I’ve got him in the dungeon - bleeding him of vervain to speed things up.” The response was so much tamer than she’d imagined, but she supposed breaking the fragile human wouldn’t end with questions answered honestly.

“I was up all night going through his files - I think the hard drive we got was only part of his research because I didn’t see much about Augustine the vampire. There was some background info on forged death certificates, but mostly just a lot of research into infectious diseases. Either this guy is going to eradicate the flu once and for all, or he’s going to cause the movie I Am Legend to become a reality.”

“So, definitely accomplices then, for the vampire part,” Klaus summed up, finishing his eggs. “At the rate he’s draining, it’ll be another hour or so before he’s compulsion-ready. You don’t need to be here for the next bit,” he added softly.

“I’m the one he’s a threat to,” she responded, glancing down, then back up at him. “I’m the one whose blood he used to turn and torture an innocent student.” She felt her eyebrows crease up, a soft, serious expression. “I really think I do.” Klaus stood, and wordlessly offered his hand.

The professor sat on a heavy wooden chair, bare torso hanging limply in his restraints, tubes running from his right wrist to a bucket full of vervain-laced blood, and from a suspended blood bag to his left wrist, ensuring that he’d survive the process.

“Well, it looks like at least one of us slept,” Klaus commented loudly, startling the man out of an anemic daze. He blinked up at his captors hazily, focusing in on Caroline. 

“I have powerful friends,” he announced, clearly working hard to keep the tremor out of his voice. “If they weren’t sure you were a vampire before, they’ll have no doubts if I’m found dead in your basement.”

“Good to know,” she responded, folding her arms and tossing her hair. “We’ll make sure to bury you in someone else’s yard when we’re done.” She knew cognitively that torture was bad. But all she could see when she looked at him was Jesse, tied down and helpless, vervain in his lungs and no daylight ring… She mentally shook herself. This man was not her father, and Jesse was not her own younger self.

“Now, speaking of those accomplices,” Klaus started, bending over so he was right in Maxfield’s face, “while we’re waiting for the vervain to clear your system, let’s start with some names, shall we? I’d like to know precisely who needs to die for my girlfriend here to finish up her freshman year in peace.

“You have to know that I’m not going to tell you anything,” Maxfield snorted. “That or you’re a complete idio—aagh!” he shouted as Klaus gripped his right index finger and snapped it.

“Oh, I know you think that,” Klaus continued conversationally, walking slowly around the chair so that he was out of the professor’s field of vision - and taking the opportunity to glance briefly at Caroline. She looked back at him steadily. “Plenty of people think that, in the beginning. But the vervain’s draining out of you, so one way or the other, you’re going to tell me. The only question,” he added, leaning over the man’s shoulder and gripping his middle finger, “is for how long will you need an assistant to do all of your typing once you do.” 

As Klaus continued to circle their captive, breaking his fingers each in turn and then moving on to carving nonsensical patterns into his chest and arms with a pocket knife, Caroline watched thoughtfully. Maxfield was clearly dedicated to his creepy secret society - who he assured them multiple times were onto her and Elena - and refused to give up any names, though he did scream a great deal. 

Klaus’s frustration was mounting the longer he held out - she could sense it - but as she’d begun to suspect, it didn’t frighten her. She remembered that night at the disastrous Prom, when she’d held him back from killing Damon, and wished it hadn’t been necessary to prevent her boyfriend from slaughtering her enemies. Now he was up to his elbows in the blood of someone who was a threat to her. It just seemed like the sort of thing she’d expect from him. The sort of thing she’d  _ want  _ from him.

The scent of blood was filling the room, strong enough to nearly drown out the vervain; she saw Klaus’s face changing and knew that her own was doing the same. She didn’t stop it. Why would she want to? This was what she was, and she wasn’t ashamed of it - especially not with him. 

Part of dating the bad guy, she supposed, was that she didn’t  _ have  _ to feel, think or do anything because she was supposed to. There were no supposed to’s for the bad guy. 

She felt free, here in the basement of a house meant to be a love nest, watching the man she loved do dark, terrible things to a man she hated - and not only because he was a threat to her safety. Because he was a threat to her human desire to attend college and study things she didn’t even care about, just for the sake of being human one more time. And why was she putting humanity on such a pedestal anyway, she wondered, feeling the eternity flowing through her veins for the second time that semester… 

-0-

“You know,” Klaus mused, ripping off the duct tape from Maxfield’s right wrist, and gently interlocking their fingers - eliciting a very satisfying squeal of protest from the doctor, “I had this friend back in Chicago in the 1920s. He had the most creative mind when it came to ripping into people. Got into their heads, figured out what they feared… what would he do, if he were here… ” He squeezed his fingers together, rotating his wrist to force Maxfield’s to rotate with it, more, more… 

He couldn’t focus on the satisfying sound and feeling of the snap - Caroline’s heart was speeding up behind him, her breathing shallow. He turned to her, noted her glazed eyes and the way she wasn’t really seeing the bleeding man in front of her, probably wasn’t really seeing anything in the room. Somehow, even though he knew it was probably only shock, she felt so far away, unreachable, untouchable… He shook himself; he’d be of no help to her if he didn’t get his head in the game.

“Darling,” he murmured, speeding in front of her and gently running his fingers down her arm, unsure if she would want to be touched by him in that moment. She shivered and gasped slightly, then blinked, eyes focusing on him. “Would you care to wait upstairs?”

“No, I’m fine,” she shook her head, more like she was clearing it than in denial. 

“Afraid your girlfriend will see you for what you really are?” the professor panted from behind them. “If it’s any consolation, by the time my friends are through with her, there won’t be enough left of her to dump your monstrous ass.”

“Cool it,” Caroline instructed quietly, taking one of his hands as he rounded on his victim. “We need names, not a dead body in the basement.”

“You really don’t have to be here,” he repeated, turning back to her and cupping her face in his free hand, squeezing the one she held.

“I really think I do,” she responded. Then, frowning, she added, “I know what I signed up for. You know that, right?”

“Ugh, well you’re obviously heavily compelled,” Maxfield muttered. Caroline sped around Klaus and hit the bleeding man so hard she actually heard his concussion. 

“What was that about answers?” Klaus chuckled, walking up beside her and gripping Maxfield by the hair to look into his eyes. “Hm, still conscious,” he added conversationally, pursing his lips and letting them turn down at the corners in a comical grimace of disinterest as he looked up at her and shook his head. “Nevermind, love. 

“Now,” he added, dropping the scientist’s head and stalking back in front of him, leaning into his face, looking balefully up under his heavy eyebrows. “If my friend Stefan were here,” he mused, “he’d have a grand old time sussing out which tortures would horrify you the most, make your blood freeze in your veins at the thought. I’ll bet,” he added in a conspiratorial whisper, glancing down at the now rather full bucket, “he could waterboard you in that vat of your own blood until you begged to be sent straight to the depths of hell just to burn it off your skin.”

The sound of Wes’s heart lurching was satisfying and familiar; the soft touch of Caroline leaning against the basement wall was somehow louder. 

“It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” he gasped out. “My accomplices know what Caroline and Elena are - if I go missing, they’ll be the first to die. And when they look into Caroline, they will find—” Kluas had moved to rip him out of the restraints the moment he finished threatening Caroline, one hand gripping the back of his head and forcing it downwards. He gasped in fear but continued, his threat cutting off only as Caroline’s arm wrapped around his middle, so hard that it knocked the wind out of him. 

Her face was three inches from Klaus’s - they were both breathing hard, glaring into each other’s eyes, neither one letting go of the limp man gasping between them.

“Would you prefer to wait upstairs?” the Original asked yet again, gritting the words out as tonelessly as possible, making a herculean effort to take the growl out of his voice. There was no need to scare her more than he already was. They were so close she had to be able to feel the heat pouring off of him.

“Would you prefer to be able to compel his accomplices' names out of him in an hour,” she responded evenly, “or give him the chance to re-ingest the vervain in that blood?”

Klaus could feel how comical his double-take looked. Blinking, he shook his head a little to clear it, and pulled Maxfield back, flinging him against the wall. He collapsed in a boneless pile, yards away from the bucket.

“Good save,” he muttered ineloquently. Having her here, so close, while his hands were dripping in blood, having her paying close enough attention to the darkest parts of him that she’d notice when he made a mistake… it rattled him. His wolf was howling in discomfort inside of him, his hair standing up on end as he tried to calm down enough to move, to say something, to extricate himself from this situation. He should have insisted that she stay away.

“If his mystery accomplices know what we are…” Caroline thought out loud, clearly less bothered by this whole mess than he was. “If he just knew about me, then it would be from Jesse. Because Jesse went away with me and came back with holes in his memories. Except, that’s not a good enough reason to suspect that something vampy happened to Jesse - and it doesn’t implicate Elena. And we’ve been really, really careful on campus,” she added, stepping away to pace back and forth in the small space, worrying a thumbnail between her teeth.

“So the question of who knows is more about  _ what  _ they could possibly have seen,” Klaus finished for her, dipping a fingertip experimentally into the blood and pulling it out with a hiss. The professor had been taking a strong concentration; they couldn’t take any chances on when he’d be vervain free. He wiped his finger on his jeans, shaking his hand as he tried to rid himself of the phantom pains of it.

“The only major vampire tell for both of us was when we got stuck at the threshold at Whitmore house,” she murmured. Two people knew us and were close enough to see how awkward it was - our dead roommate and the newly turned vampire TA sleeping in said dead roommate’s bed. Neither of them would have had the motive or opportunity to out us on a large scale.”

“Jesse’s memories of you would have come back upon turning,” Klaus reminded her, trying very hard not to let his brain wander into imagining Jesse crashing in Caroline’s dorm room. “He may not have been as torture-resistant as our unwelcome houseguest.” He gestured at Maxfield’s unconscious form, flicking his hand again. That stuff really burned!

“No, it wasn’t him,” Caroline shook her head. “Anyway, he didn’t know about Elena - just me and Stefan. Until Jesse turned, any evidence against us was basically circumstantial. Maybe the key to this whole nightmare isn’t about burying his accomplices.” She turned to him, hope glowing in her face. “I think all we need to do is bury the evidence. Prove definitively that Elena and I are human.”

“That leaves the rather pressing questions of who you’re needing to prove it to, and how exactly you’re going to do that,” Klaus reminded her, giving up on dulling the burn in his finger and folding his arms. “Ergo, houseguest. We’re probably an hour or two out from compulsion.” He reluctantly picked up the unconscious man and dumped him back in the chair, duct-taping him back into place.

“Jesse said his roommate Aaron technically owns Whitmore house,” Caroline realized softly. Her face was breaking into the wide grin she got whenever she came up with an event plan that was going to work out just right. “I think it’s time for him to learn about compulsion, and for Elena and I to invite ourselves to an honors society interest event this morning. All of Whitmore’s senior staff will be there - at least one of them has to be working with him. Let them all see that we’re completely normal humans. Then you can compel Maxfield to forget what he knows, and he’ll show up late with a hangover.”

“And when something inevitably goes wrong and you’re in the middle of a privately-owned house with an unknown number of vampire hunters among the faculty?” Klaus demanded as evenly as he could as he finished re-inserting the needles into Wes’s arms.

“I’ll have Aaron invite Stefan in too, and he can park nearby and listen in for any need to save us.”

“You can have Aaron invite  _ me  _ in too, and  _ I'll  _ park nearby and listen for any need to save you,” Klaus countered, slapping a piece of tape over Maxfield’s mouth. “Stefan can babysit.”

“I can’t bring Stefan…  _ here _ ,” she exclaimed, gesturing at the unconscious man and all the blood spattered on the floor around him. “His memories of being your murder buddy are fried; he has no frame of reference for this stuff. I don’t know what he’d do. Besides,” she sighed, “we have one creepy mad scientist dude who we know is evil and kidnappy, but his accomplices could just be researchers and stuff. He’s the only one I’m sure I should be worried about, so I’d feel a lot safer if it was you making sure that I don’t have to be.” 

They held each other’s stare for another long moment. It wasn’t in Klaus’s nature to back down on something like this, but his mind was jumbled and pulling in different directions - he couldn’t concentrate. The smell of blood mixed with the stink of vervain and terrified human wasn’t mixing well with Caroline’s shampoo and her natural scent. These things were never, ever meant to mix in the first place, and he couldn’t make sense of them, couldn’t get his head in the game.

“Fine,” he growled, “but Aaron’s inviting me in anyway, just in case.”

“Deal,” Caroline agreed, darting forward and kissing him briefly before flitting up the stairs to call Elena and relay the plan. 

-0-

The Honors Society Freshman informational meeting began promptly at 9am - a clear discrimination in favor of morning people in Caroline’s opinion. While she would normally have turned up to an event like this 15 minutes early, to show drive and initiative, she was still sitting in the back seat of Elena’s car at 8:58, waiting so that she could be sure as many people as possible paid attention to her grand and uncomplicated entrance. She had been focused, confident, and full of energy when Jesse and Elena had arrived in the parking lot 10 minutes ago.

Now, not so much.

“Good to know,” Caroline said tightly, making a concentrated effort not to crush her phone between her hands. “That we are going to be working with the monster who murdered my mother and tortured my boyfriend, and that Stefan can’t be here to potentially save our asses because he’s stuck in a cabin with said monster’s ex and arch-nemesis.”

“I don’t like it either, Care,” Elena sighed, “but he might be able to bring Bonnie back. We have to try!”

“So, since you don’t have backup… are you going into the meeting?” Jesse checked, watching the clock turn over to 8:59.

“Do you want to get Klaus here?” Elena asked, twisting around to look at her. Caroline shook her head. 

“I don’t want to leave Dr. Creepy unattended if we don’t have to,” she reasoned. “No one would try anything in a room full of students anyway. Jesse, you can be backup. If you hear screams or kidnappy sounds, call my boyfriend.”

“Will do,” the new vampire promised, holding up his phone to scan the contact QR code that Caroline had generated. The girls stepped out of the car, reaching the front door of Whitmore house just seconds before 9am. It opened with a suitably dramatic creak of heavy wood on old hinges, and the group of students and faculty members all getting situated for the start of the meeting turned to watch the two walk right over the threshold.

“Hi everyone,” Caroline greeted them winningly. “We’re not late, are we?”

-0-

“And?” Klaus answered the phone, knowing how abrupt he sounded but not having an ounce of patience as he waited to hear the fate of the love of his life after she’d just walked into a house full of vampire hunters an hour ago.

“Stunning success, as predicted,” she assured him. “I even got a little cut when I was making myself a bagel - I heal slowly enough on my left hand that I was still visibly bleeding when Dr. Laughlin gave me a bandaid. We looked like 100% home-grown humans.” 

Even a floor and a locked door away from all of the blood in the basement, Klaus felt his vision flash gold, dark veins blooming across his face as rage and fear in equal measure thrilled through him. She’d cut herself? A vampire in a room full of hunters and she’d just sliced right into her hand, not a care in the world. He made an effort to breathe evenly. He was clearly more overtired than he’d thought.

“Keep Wes alive,” Caroline was instructing, not having noticed his slip from her end. “Make him think that he slept through his alarm this morning - that way everything will go seamlessly back to normal.”

“He dissects vampires in his evil lab,” Klaus reminded her, gesturing widely even though she couldn’t see it on the other end of the phone. “He’s not exactly someone I want running around near you.”

“We’re apparently best buddies with Silas now,” Caroline sighed. “Dr. Evil is small potatoes in comparison. Besides this whole charade only works if he turns up for his next class in an hour.”

“And we don’t need to give anyone a reason to question what I’m certain was an Oscar-worthy performance from you this morning,” Klaus finished for her, nodding sourly.

“Exactly,” she practically purred into her phone. “Hey, I gotta go - can’t be late for class right after applying for the honors society. Love you!”

“Love—” he started, but she’d hung up already. He frowned at his phone for a moment before rolling his eyes, stuffing it in his pocket, and heading back down to the basement to compel the creepy professor to get off his girlfriend’s case. She was probably just trying to get back to a sense of calm and mundane after witnessing his disturbing activities of an hour ago on no sleep. 

Everything would surely be back to normal by tomorrow. 


	9. How to Save a Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter specific TW: moderate gore - basically explicitly described canon-typical ripper stuff.

“So, let me get this straight,” Caroline snipped, palms pressed together, index fingers against her nose and thumbs beneath her jaw as she appeared in the background of Elena’s video call with Damon where he’d just introduced them to “Crazy-Pants” Amara, the now very human Anchor to the Other Side. “Your pact with unspeakable evil predictably crashed and burned, so now you want to try the same thing with a different unspeakable evil, and hope it turns out better?”

“Bonnie agrees with you,” Jeremy called helpfully from Damon’s end of the call. The black-haired vampire waved a shushing hand in his direction.

“Look, Tessa needs something indestructible for her plan to work - and with ghost-Bonnie cooperating, that makes her life much easier. We’re not reliant on her goodwill like we were with Silas.”

“Besides,” Elena added, “she needs doppelganger blood to do the spell, so without Katherine and me, she loses out on her last chance for revenge. She can’t do this without us, and we won’t do it without Bonnie coming back.”

Caroline scrubbed her palms across her face and over the top of her head, fingers running through her hair. She’d gotten a few hours of sleep last night, but kept waking from twisted nightmares about her mom.

“I’ll talk to Katherine about participating,” she agreed heavily. “She owes me a favor after helping to smooth things over between her and Klaus over the summer. But if this doesn’t work…” she shook her head, swallowing before she could continue. “I just don’t like us getting involved in this level of ancient immortal pissing contest. Again.”

“I know,” Elena agreed, turning to her as Damon ended the call. “But if it gets us Bonnie back?”

“I know,” Caroline echoed, rolling onto her back to grab her phone off the nightstand so she could call Katherine.

-0-

“Far be it from me to pry into your clearly excellent love life, dear brother,” Elijah commented lightly as Klaus poured himself a second drink and tossed it back, sprawled comfortably on the sofa in the living room of Elijah’s Mystic Falls rental.

“Then don’t,” Klaus grumbled. “Just because I’m here talking about some boring witches with you rather than being with Caroline every waking minute doesn’t mean anything’s wrong between us.”

“Actually,” Elijah corrected, “I was simply noticing that she hasn’t yet returned the three text messages you’ve sent her while I was explaining the issue - and she is now on the phone with Katerina.” He nodded in the direction of the master bedroom upstairs where, sure enough, Katherine’s voice was alternating with Caroline’s through a speaker.

“They’re trying to bring her best friend back from the dead, and I am giving my full attention to you and your concerns about these bloody Roma witches or whomever,” Klaus responded sulkily. “We are both clearly occupied. Now, you said there’s more where Silas and Quetsiya came from?”

As Elijah returned to his monologue about these Travelers beginning to gather in Richmond, Klaus kept half of his attention on the conversation occurring above him. Apparently, the ancient witch Quetsiya required doppelganger blood for the spell that was going to bring Bonnie back and trap Silas on the Other Side for all of eternity. Luckily for her, said doppelgangers being vampires didn’t impact the spell at all. Why did things like that seem only to happen to him?

“So you want me to take a drive with you and make some threats,” Klaus summarized as Katherine hung up, having promised her help.

“I’m hoping we can negotiate peacefully,” Elijah sighed, “but if such methods should fail, you are the perfect loose canon to play Bad Cop, as they say.” 

Klaus felt his face spasm momentarily into something that might have been an attempt at a smile or a grimace. Resident Bad Guy - that was him. Something that hadn’t bothered him in centuries, until yesterday morning when he had to imagine what he must look like through Caroline’s eyes. 

She’d said it didn’t bother her, that she knew what she’d signed up for, and he wanted to believe her. But wanting to believe had gotten him into some sticky situations before, and he couldn’t take the chance of bringing harm to her. Perhaps a little space would be a good thing for them right now.

“I’m in,” he agreed as his phone vibrated. One text from Caroline, saying that Katherine was on board for the spell and that she was crossing her fingers that it would all work out. He texted back a wish for her good luck, and that he wouldn’t be able to be there because Elijah was roping him into some other magical mayhem. 

Such great communication they had. He was fine - they were fine. He wasn’t the least bit bothered by the fact that Jesse the innocent and attractive vampire was going to be following her around like a lost puppy while he was a hundred miles south growling at some strange witches for worrying his brother. Everything was just bloody fine.

He didn’t throw his phone, he didn’t crush his glass, he didn’t even pour himself a third drink. Instead he took a deep breath, stood up and followed Elijah out to his car. 

He knew that he went mad with jealousy at the slightest provocation; it wasn’t like he thought the average healthy person stabbed their siblings into comas every time they tried to leave him. Of the laundry list of character flaws that by now made up nearly the whole of his personality, he wasn’t fool enough to assume that he could just go through and delete them all to please his girlfriend. But he also knew that he didn’t want to be the jealous and overbearing type with her, whatever it took on his part to calm that urge down. She loved him because he’d chosen her against all odds and over all others - by God and all of his angels he was going to trust her to do the same.

This did not, of course, mean that he wasn’t relieved to be going somewhere where he could kill people with impunity.

-0-

Wes’s hard drive was a nightmare written into computer code. Caroline sat on her bed, thumbnail clamped between her teeth, reminding herself to breathe evenly as she watched videos and read lab write-ups of all the horrible things he’d been doing to Jesse, and to other vampires through the years. It had taken her hours of painstaking searching to get through all the regular medical research that he wanted to patent so badly he hid it on a secret drive, but she’d finally found the folder with the real nasty stuff.

The number 62547 indicated Jesse - a number of the tortures (she couldn’t in good conscience call them tests) performed on him were compared in the write-ups to a subject 12144, who had apparently been there much longer. Subject 21051, lost to Augustine decades ago with 12144’s help, was also occasionally mentioned. Caroline shivered as she forced herself to click on images. If this was the cost of learning how to cure the flu, then maybe the world was better off if people just got the yearly shot and had done with it. She shook her head as she opened up another file. This wasn’t medicine. She wasn’t even sure it qualified as science at this point. Seriously rethinking whether she wanted to just kill this guy, she clicked on Jesse’s hyperlinked ID number.

Then the words “vampire ripper” caught her eye immediately, glaring up at her right out of the title of the document.

“Oh,” she whispered as her eyes scanned through the text with supernatural speed. “Wow.” 

A knock on the door abruptly snapped her back to the present, and she closed her laptop perhaps a little too hard, secreting away the drive under her pillow in a fluid motion as she stood up.

“Jesse!” She greeted her new vampire with a smile as he held up a drink carrier with two coffees and a paper bag perched behind them.

“I got you those cheese buns you said you liked,” he announced. “I was hoping you’d come to class with me - I know he doesn’t remember anything, but…”

“I wouldn’t want to be alone with someone who’d tortured me either,” Caroline assured him, taking her coffee and looking him up and down as subtly as she could. He tended to binge on blood bags, she’d noticed over the past 48 hours, but so far he hadn’t seemed to have any interest in attacking her - not even when she’d gotten into the enclosed space of Elena’s car with him yesterday with her left thumb still sluggishly bleeding. 

Maxfield must have messed up, she decided as she grabbed her bag and coat and followed Jesse out into the hall. Still, she reasoned, he was brand new, and vampire-craving ripper or not he should have a chaperone for the first few days until he got confident around people.

“Hey, tonight my friends and I are meeting in Mystic Falls to try and bring our friend Bonnie back,” she explained as he held the door open for her to exit the dorm building. “There’s a lot going on and a whole lot that could go wrong…”

“You need backup again, like yesterday?” he offered helpfully. “My schedule is clear - and hey, at least this time visiting your hometown I’ll know what I’m walking into.” They both laughed a little ruefully.

“Thanks Jesse,” she responded with a smile, choosing not to explain that what she really needed was to keep an eye on him. At least he was taking this whole vampire thing in stride - though he’d had the advantage of her and Elena showing him the ropes and just how fun and amazing it could all be. Much as she loved Stefan, maybe his broody approach was a disadvantage to those he taught.

-0-

“Look, Mr. Mikaelson,” Sloane of the Travelers was saying in a placating voice, “all we want is a home where we can be safe and free to practice our traditions. My people haven’t had that in thousands of years. With Silas and Amara both mortal, and Quetsiya occupied with them, we can lift the witches’ curse on our bloodline so that we can congregate and practice.”

“And as I’ve already said,” Elijah responded, clipped and tightly controlled, “we have no issue with that - provided you do so somewhere other than the Washington Metropolitan area. That region is already populated with quite a few magical beings, and if I correctly understand what you would need to do in order to purify a space for your magic, that’s not going to mix well.”

Klaus’s eyes were in a permanent state of narrowness, something about these seemingly harmless witches and their interest in his home was raising his hackles, igniting his wolf’s suspicion in ways that hadn’t happened in years. He distracted himself by imagining the simplest and most efficient way to kill every last one of them - who he’d start with, who he’d slow down so he could go after the others, how he’d herd them in close so they couldn’t scatter and elude him.

Why on earth Elijah wanted to start with a friendly negotiation was beyond him… 

-0-

Caroline sat on the stone railing of Stefan’s balcony, two glasses of Merlot resting untouched beside her. 

“I guess as seances go this is probably a crappy one,” she sighed. “Your favorite wine, that you can’t even drink because you’re a ghost, and I’m not a witch, so I’m probably not able to really call you up right now. I could always ask Jeremy to play go-between, but this feels… private. I guess it’s more like praying, really.” She picked up the glass closest to her, holding it in her fingertips and gazing hard at the rippling red surface, not wanting to stare around at nothing.

“Bonnie Bennett, I hope you feel honored - this is the first time I’ve prayed to anything in my atheist life.” She giggled, taking a sip of the wine. Her left hand, resting on the stone beside her, suddenly felt warm - like someone was holding it.

“Oh,” she whispered, tears welling up in her eyes. She flipped her hand over, palm up, and felt familiar fingers lace through hers.

“I thought I liked all the supernatural madness around me - and I do, I guess,” she confessed, “but ever since I found out you died… it’s like everything’s been going wrong. I found out Matt got Hunters Cursed, and Stefan’s lost his memories, and now my new friend Jesse got turned into some kind of vampire-eating ripper… Everyone is hurting, and no matter how strong I am, there’s nothing I can do about it. 

“Is this how you felt,” she asked quietly, “when you found out about all of this in the beginning?” Bonnie squeezed her hand. Her whole arm warmed - her friend must have been leaning up against her. She tilted her head, and found it resting on a familiar shoulder.

“I know that us working with Silas and Tessa and all of that isn’t exactly making you happy. It’s something that you the Good Life Choices Witch would never approve of, and for good reason.” The ghost body next to her was shaking, probably with laughter. 

“But right now, we have the chance to do for you what you’ve always done for us - move heaven and earth to keep you safe and get you back. And I want you to understand that even if it’s dangerous, even if it backfires again, that you deserve nothing less. So we’re going to keep trying, and we’ll deal with what comes when it comes.”

“Caroline?” Stefan’s voice called from the hallway, and she downed the rest of her wine as he appeared in the doorway. “They’re ready to get started downstairs.”

She felt Bonnie get up, and gently tug at her to get her to follow.

“Okay,” Caroline responded, setting down her empty glass and wiping her eyes with her free right hand. “Let’s do this.”

-0-

In the yard down below, Jesse sat, paralyzed in confusion. He’d just come outside to take a call from his cousin, but after he’d hung up, he’d heard Caroline starting to talk to what he was pretty sure was her dead friend. 

She’d said he was supposed to eat vampires. But before she’d said he was craving human blood from blood bags? He didn’t understand. Which one was he supposed to want?

-0-

“Well, that went well,” Elijah commented with his habitual dry sarcasm as he handed Klaus his pocket square to wipe the blood from his face. 

Klaus had snapped in the middle of Elijah making rather a good point, actually; fury overwhelming him and blazing red across his vision. He’d sprung into action, ramming his fist through his first target’s heart so hard that he’d been able to hit the woman standing behind him. After that he’d been a blur of tearing hands and sharp teeth, peripherally aware of the fact that Elijah was standing in the background, fingers massaging his temples. 

He’d gotten through thirteen of them before suddenly his rage cooled, like something heavy and toxic had been overshadowing him, and had suddenly lifted as the thirteenth soul departed. The remainder had run, chanting cloaking spells and vanishing in a way that he was now realizing they could probably have done at the beginning… 

“That went according to plan,” Klaus corrected heavily, accepting the piece of cloth and rubbing it irritably over his red-coated skin. “It just wasn’t planned by either of us, I think.”

This wasn’t the first time someone had used his violent tendencies to kill people for their own gain - but it was certainly the first time he’d literally been possessed and hadn’t noticed. He rested his forehead on the heels of his hands, trying to push away the aftershocks of a foreign mind invading his own. How long had whoever that was been working on him, to be so subtle he hadn’t noticed the intrusion? He shuddered, trying to think back, figure out how many hours, days even, his thoughts and feelings might not have been his own. The last time he was certain that he was acting without influence was that morning in the basement with Caroline and Maxfield, two days ago.

He shook himself, deliberately putting off the issue until he had time to deal with it properly. Perhaps he’d pay Terry a visit, ask her to look for any traces of foreign magic in his mind. 

For now, he had bodies to hide, and a facade to maintain in front of Elijah if he didn’t want to be mother-henned for the next century by the older vampire. 

-0-

Bonnie fell into reality crying out in pain, eyes squeezed shut as she curled in on herself. Elena caught her, holding her tightly as she lowered both of them to the ground, trying to assure her that she was safe, she was okay now. Caroline fell to her knees beside them, stroking the hair out of Bonnie’s face as she stopped screaming and started pulling in heavy, rattling breaths.

“Bonnie?” Jeremy was exclaiming worriedly over Elena’s shoulder, and Bonnie was able to sit up enough to look at him. An exhausted smile banished the pain from her face as her boyfriend joined the hug pile on the floor.

“What happened? Why were you screaming?” Caroline demanded, not wanting to interrupt the reunion, but certain in her bones that something had gone wrong, Tessa had screwed Bonnie over somehow.

“There were these thirteen witches,” she gasped, “I guess they all died just as I became the anchor…” she shook her head, pressing her eyes shut before opening them and taking a deep breath. “I don’t know what happened. But they’re gone now.” She reached out a hand and cupped Caroline’s face, and Caroline realized just how little she’d been able to feel of her when they’d talked on the balcony earlier.

“Hey, is there any wine?” Bonnie asked with a tired grin. “I could really use some.” Caroline’s answering smile bloomed across her face, and she nodded, popping up and heading to grab the rest of the bottle of Merlot. If Bonnie said she was okay, then she was okay. She had her best friend back, and she wasn’t about to ruin the moment by channeling Klaus’s paranoia.

-0-

Stefan hunched over the kitchen sink, his head hanging over his bloodied hands. He couldn’t even tell how much of it was his and how much was Silas’s - and how different were they really? They were doppelgangers after all. He shivered, turning the water on and starting to scrub all of the redness off of his skin. His hands shook, and the dryness in his throat wouldn’t go away no matter how much he swallowed.

“Stefan, right?” a vaguely familiar voice greeted him, and he whirled to face Caroline’s new vampire Jesse. The younger immortal was sitting at the table, two empty blood bags in front of him as he drained the last sip out of a third.

“Jesse,” Stefan responded. “Hey, look… I’m sorry about the first time we met. I… wasn’t myself.”

“You’re a ripper, right?” Jesse said quietly, standing and pacing slowly nearer, his eyes taking in all the blood, the tears in Stefan’s shirt from the fight. “Caroline explained.” Stefan felt his eyebrows spasm in place of a nod - he supposed he couldn’t fault Caroline for explaining a traumatic experience Jesse had had.

“She said…” he murmured, walking closer still, the veins darkening around his eyes as he came within two feet of Stefan. “She told me… but tonight I overheard…” Unsteady, he took a half step back, wrenching his gaze up to meet Stefan’s.

“What am I?” he breathed.

“What are you talking about?” Stefan asked warily. He was too tired, too wrung out, and had entirely too few memories to know how to deal with this. “I should go get Caroline.”

“Caroline?” Jesse whispered, eyes widening, a desperate, sad, hopeful look taking over his face. 

“Yeah, Caroline will know what to do. She always does.”

“She always does,” Jesse sighed, relief clear in his face.

Then his teeth were gouging into Stefan’s neck, shredding through skin and veins, desperately ripping through him to get at as much blood as possible. Stefan cried out in pain and fear, his hands gripping Jesse’s shoulders and trying to push him away, but he was digging in too deep - if he backed off Stefan’s head was coming with him, the older vampire realized with a jolt of real terror.

“Stefan? Jesse?” Caroline exclaimed as she ran in from the wine cellar, a half-full bottle in her hand.

“Help,” Stefan croaked out as she flashed over to them, her hands joining his trying to pull Jesse away.

“Jesse, stop!” she shouted, and his jaws mercifully released. He went limp in her arms and allowed her to drag him away. Stefan stumbled back, a hand clamped protectively over the quickly-sealing wounds to his throat.

“What were you doing? What is the matter with you?” she demanded.

“I’m a vampire ripper,” Jesse responded, sounding hurt, as if it was obvious. “You said that’s what Maxfield turned me into - and you told me what a ripper is!”

“But you were around my blood yesterday and you didn’t have a problem,” Caroline shook her head in confusion. “I thought he failed - what changed?”

“I - you told me to!” Jesse repeated helplessly.

The realization hit her like the knowledge was being poured, liquid and cold, right into her head. Caroline swallowed. She breathed. Then she pushed Jesse gently until he sat down on the chair behind him. She sat as well, looking him deeply in the eyes.

“Jesse,” she began, softly but firmly, “I read that he tried. But I really think that he failed. That’s mostly witch blood on Stefan anyway, and you remember you were fine with mine in the car yesterday. I really want you to keep drinking from blood bags. I don’t want you to hurt anyone, I don’t want you to try to drink any more vampire blood. And I’m going to help you, okay?” Jesse nodded, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

“I’m sorry man,” he called to Stefan over Caroline’s shoulder, horror setting in behind his eyes. “I don’t… know what came over me.”

“It happens,” Stefan responded tightly. “I guess we’re even now.” Caroline dug her keys out of her pocket and pressed them into Jesse’s hand.

“Go and wait in the car,” she instructed. “I’m going to bring this up, then I’ll take you back to campus. You probably need some rest, after tonight.” Jesse nodded, taking the keys and standing up obediently.

“Oh, and no more eavesdropping,” she called. “You should know by now that that only causes awful misunderstandings between people.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder as he vanished down the hall.

“I’m missing all but a few weeks of my memories,” Stefan said quietly, turning the tap back on, “but I can tell that you just realized something really bad.” Caroline nodded mutely, then took a shaky breath and turned to him.

“It’s called a sire bond,” she explained miserably. “It happens sometimes, when a vampire is turned by someone they have strong feelings for. He’ll be loyal to me and do whatever I tell him to do, until I tell him to go away and live his life without me.”

“Okay, that sounds… freaky,” Stefan admitted, and Caroline laughed humorlessly.

“It’s an awful violation of a person’s bodily autonomy,” she agreed. “And I always told myself that if anyone was ever sired to me, no matter who they were or what we were to each other, I would break it immediately. But I didn’t even notice this one for two days. And if I break the bond…”

“Then you can’t magically tell him not to kill vampires whenever he’s hungry,” Stefan finished for her. She nodded, shoulders sinking and head hanging. She turned her phone over and over in her hands.

“Can’t you just ask your Original boyfriend to compel him not to be a vampire-killing monster?” Stefan suggested, finally scrubbing the last of the blood from his arms and grabbing a paper towel to get to work on his face.

“Yeah, I could,” Caroline responded, “but then I run the risk of him killing Jesse out of jealousy - because he wouldn’t have gotten into this state if he didn’t have strong feelings for me. And I’m the one who brought him with me that day, and didn’t check up on him after he got hurt, and…”

“And I’m the one who hurt him in the first place,” Stefan cut her off. “Look, I might not know much about the world, but I know that playing the blame game isn’t going to get you anywhere.” She looked up at him, smiling a tiny, sad smile.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “You’re right. You usually are,” she added a little sourly. “Look, I just… need some time to think. I’m going to take Jesse somewhere safe, take this weekend and try to come up with a plan where nobody dies. Do me a favor and don’t tell anyone about this until I have something? I don’t trust Damon not to kill him preemptively either.”

“What are best friends for?” Stefan responded with a little sad smile of his own. She hugged him, then grabbed the wine and flashed upstairs.

“Aw, what a moving display,” Tessa’s voice mocked out of thin air, and Stefan whipped his head back and forth, trying to find her in the empty kitchen. The witch lifted her cloaking spell, appearing where she’d apparently been sitting on the countertop for some time. “It’s too bad that you can’t remember enough about being a ripper yourself to help her. Too bad I took all of your pain away, and gave you a fresh start… only for you to betray me.” 

She hopped off the counter, stalking towards him, and all the immortality in the world wouldn’t have made him feel any less small as she approached. There was a light of mad excitement in her eyes, and something else, something more sinister, and it took his breath away. He couldn’t even scream.

“You tried to kill Silas before I could move the anchor,” she accused. “You would have taken him from me, for your own petty revenge, right in my moment of triumph. I think I made a mistake in taking away your pain Stefan,” she murmured, her fingertips pressing against his temples. 

“Time for you to have all of that back now.”

It wasn’t like in the movies, lost memories returning in a montage of important moments, snippet by snippet. One second he didn’t remember and the next he did, a century and a half of vampirism dropping neatly into place, and bringing with it a horrible, desperate need to breathe, he was drowning, it was so dark, he couldn’t— 

He didn’t even realize he’d bitten Tessa until his hands pulled her apart of their own accord. Her broken body lay on the floor, a smooth smile of victory still on her lifeless face.

-0-

Markos stood on top of a car, the closest thing to a stage he could find in the clearing where his people had met. He breathed deeply, enjoying the feeling of air in his human lungs for the first time in centuries. 

“My children,” he greeted the Travelers as they continued to swarm in, packing the space and looking up at him with hope in their eyes. 

“I thank you for your courage. Your patience. And your sacrifice.” He bowed his head in reverence to honor the thirteen brave volunteers he’d highlighted in the Hybrid’s mind. His people bowed their heads as well, falling silent in respect. Then he looked up, eyes roving over them.

“Now we can begin.”

-0-

“Okay, the neighbor owns the house, so we’ll need to get her to invite us in,” Caroline explained as she crossed the lawn with Jesse silently following her. “Klaus keeps it stocked with plenty of blood for emergencies, so we can hang out here for the weekend and get your head back on straight before you have to be in class with people.”

“Or,” a horrifyingly familiar voice suggested, and suddenly Caroline could swear she was being maced - something that burned like vervain but clung to her skin like sap was being sprayed liberally in her face, and she fell to the neighbor’s porch, screaming in pain. 

“You could lay low somewhere far more… educational,” Maxfield finished, and she heard the sprayer turn back on, and Jesse fell behind her, roaring and scrubbing at his eyes.

“How,” she croaked, rolling into a ball and covering her head as more of the spray soaked through her shirt, coating her arm and burning a hundred times more than vervain had any business doing.

“Your father used to work with Augustine on a freelance basis,” the professor monologues happily, squatting down bayside her to pull her arm away and cuff it to the other behind her back. “He taught us this neat anti-compulsion mind trick. It’s too bad he went to visit you one day and never came back.”

Then a vicious kick to her head sent her mind spinning off into merciful blackness.

**Author's Note:**

> Well folks, that's all for now. Come and scream with me on Tumblr - @BethNottingham013


End file.
